'Moon' Review

With a cold, foreboding atmosphere and perfect pacing, director Duncan Jones’ impressive feature debut, “Moon,” immediately sweeps you up in its existential look at the human condition of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a mining engineer on the dark side of the moon with only two weeks to go on a three-year stint spent in almost total isolation.

In what’s pretty much a one-man show, Rockwell’s superb as an ordinary man counting down the days until his flight home to a wife he misses more with each passing minute and a daughter born just before his shift began. Due to technical problems, he can’t communicate in real-time with anyone, including his loved ones and the people who run the company he works for. The long delay between each space transmission only serves to increase Sam’s feeling of disconnect and loneliness — and the strain’s starting to show. Every day he looks as though his very lifeforce is draining from him and the hallucinations have begun.

Sam’s only company is GERTY (voiced ably by Kevin Spacey), a manservant robot with one of those HAL 9000 voices so calming it chills. GERTY’s generic, yellow-faced emoticons (a throwback to the 70’s, like the film itself) only adds to the machine’s menacing, passive-aggressive lack of humanity, but after crashing a lunar rover into one of the company’s four hulking surface-mining machines (each named after one of the four Gospels), a spooky robot becomes the least of Sam’s problems.

Aided by a confident, visually-gifted director and a tight script that hits all the right emotional turning points, Rockwell delivers a memorable performance worthy of Oscar consideration. Like Tom Hanks in “Castaway,” for long periods of screen time (most of it set in a single claustrophobic location), Rockwell effortlessly holds the screen with a tour de force performance that engages all of your attention and even more of your sympathy.

Reportedly, “Moon” was inspired by the director’s affection for “2001,” “Silent Running” and other films from the 60’s and 70’s that similarly dwelled on space and isolation, and this shows (though I’d argue “Moon” is far superior to “2001” and “Running,” both of which bore me stiff). But for my money “Moon” is much closer in style, mood and flavor to the best film of 2007, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (which also starred Rockwell), another beautifully realized character study that rooted around the soul to see what constitutes an individual’s humanity, and through elegiac pacing, cast a dream-like spell you never want broken.

But most of all, “Moon” is about the irreplaceable value of the human individual. On the surface – in the text — the bad guys are just another liberal Hollywood trope, but in reality – in the subtext – the villain is a callous, selfish mindset that devalues the individual and marginalizes certain types of human life if the ends justify a cause and a convenience. This is what makes it so distinctive from the films that inspired its creator. Whereas “2001” refuses to acknowledge humanity and “Silent Running” flaunts a self-satisfied moral superiority, in “Moon” the only thing that matters is Sam — an ordinary working-class guy who loves his family, signs off his transmissions with “Rock-n-roll and God bless America,” and just wants to go home.

Existentialism isn’t easy to pull off, especially for a first time director. But Jones keeps his eye where it belongs, squarely on his central character, one of us, someone we can relate to on first glance. He also doesn’t answer any of his own questions (the key to avoiding pretension) and in the best tradition of the genre, leaves open the possibility that it was all just a terrible dream.

But even if it was, that doesn’t make what happens any less poignant.