It’s rare—vanishingly rare—for me to walk out of a movie theater so wholly satisfied by the experience that I can think of nothing at all to complain about. The last time this happened was with Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, of which I loved every glorious, harrowing minute.
That film was a dark one, taking a—well, let’s call it a skeptical view of humanity. But now we have Moon, a film with which I likewise have absolutely no complaint, and which is (in my view) gloriously uplifting, to boot.
It’s essentially impossible to talk about Moon without making the by-now standard observation that, hey, there’s hardly any hard science fiction at the movies these days. I don’t consider this a huge failing of Hollywood; I have as much affection for Star Warsy space opera as I do for 2001ish hard SF—what I crave, what nourishes my very soul, is of course story.
Moon‘s story is Sam Bell’s story. He is a solitary miner on the surface of the moon, tasked with overseeing the mostly automated equipment that extracts Helium 3 from the lunar soil to be shipped home. Nearing the end of his three-year contract, he’s grown intensely homesick, his tenuous sanity held in place by his anticipation of being reunited with his wife—and their young daughter, who he’s never met. Sam Rockwell’s turn as Bell is inspired for the empathy he evokes as the lonely miner, and for other reasons—reasons I would not dream of revealing. The man has probably never had this much screen time before, but Moon proves he deserves more still.
The film has the psychic claustrophobia common to many films that choose space as a setting, but it proves that we’ve become complacent in our expectations of such films; Moon defies as many tropes as it embraces, and even jaded viewers can expect a few significant surprises.
Among those surprises is Kevin Spacey’s turn as Sam’s robotic assistant, Gerty. Film is strewn with robotic, artificially intelligent characters, but none in recent memory have the verisimilitude of Gerty. He sounds like what an artificial intelligence that does his job would sound like—my friends who actually work in AI assure me that this is not my imagination.
I literally cannot think of anything I did not like about Moon. The production design, effect, score, casting—everything was exactly what it needed to be, no more and no less. Even the ending, which I was dead certain would let me down in some way, did not. It is absolutely one of my favorite films of the decade, and I’m not just engaging in Knowlesian hyperbole when I say that.
Director Duncan Jones had this to say about his goals for the film: “I want people who love movies to say, ‘That was pretty damn good. I wonder what these guys are going to do next…’”
You’ve certainly got my attention, Mr. Jones.
I would finally like to point out that today, July 16, 2009, is the fortieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11.
