Monday, April 12, 2010

Moon - Review


Moon

Director:Duncan Jones

Sam Rockwell - Sam Bell
Kevin Spacey - GERTY (voice)

For the most part Moon is a one man show. Sam Rockwell plays Moon Helium 3 miner Sam Bell on a 3 year stint with Lunar Industries to mine Earth's primary source of energy on the far side of the Moon. All is going well, if a bit lonely, as Sam nears the end of his contract. However he starts to hear and see things that do not jibe with "world view". At one point these "hallucinations" distract him so much that he manages to hit and disable a mining machine and strand himself in the process. The weirdness continues when he awakens in the station's infirmary to be told by the robot caretaker GERTY that he had been in an accident.

GERTY begins to act very HAL like when Sam states his wishes to go outside. He finally misdirects GERTY enough to agree to let him exit the habitat where he immediately heads for the original crash site. What he finds there totally flies in the face of everything he thought he knew about his job, the company, himself and eventually his family.

Moon will play fast and loose with your sense of reality and self. At times you have a very real feeling that you are in the middle of a Silent Running remake, only for it to turn into an even creepier version of 2001 and to some extent, Alien It goes without saying that all of these movies seemed to have influenced Moon.

There are some major twists and reversals dealt in Moon, it would be best to leave all preconceptions at the start of the movie. Though budgeted like an indie film, everything about it is top notch science fiction. At the risk of giving something away, you soon forget that the only actor on screen is Sam Rockwell. I honestly see this film being compared favorably in the future with those films that inspired it.

The movie itself is well worth the rental. But the Blu-ray version is a movie fan treat. There are two comment tracks, special effects real, two q&a reels, a making of short and another short science fiction film called Whisper that puts a completely new spin of what might be called the third oldest profession.

I could pick at the movie and the speciality tracks, but it really would be nit picking. This movie disk is well worth a rental or even better a great addition to your disk library.

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