Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.
To be fair, it’s hard not to get excited – or at the very least just a little curious – about an indie sci-fi flick starring Sam Rockwell and directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones. For all that, though, Moon turns out to be a curiously bloodless affair – precisely directed, expertly acted, but cold to the touch, perhaps by design.
As Sam Bell, the sole occupant of a lunar mining base where he’s helping harvest energy from the moon’s surface, Rockwell has to give us both a sense of his dreary, solitary existence (the job is a three-year contract) and the calmly methodical personality trait demanded of space travelers. In other words, he has to do what Keir Dullea did in 2001: A Space Odyssey – but he also has to find a way to carry the film’s emotional weight, since he’s all we got. (Dullea, at the very least, had Gary Lockwood and Strauss to keep him company.) Rockwell does what he can – when he attempts to talk to his wife and daughter on Earth, we do get a sense of his longing. By contrast, Gary Lockwood’s response to an intra-galactic transmission from mom and dad in 2001 was comically flat.
These 2001 references aren’t just obligatory; Moon replicates or references so many of the Kubrick film’s elements (it even has a dry shipboard computer, Gertie, voiced by Kevin Spacey) that it sets up strange narrative expectations; such aggressive referentiality is often a sign that a film is about to take a sharp left turn at some point. For my part, I kept waiting for it to turn into The Truman Show. It doesn’t do that (sigh), but it does contain two major twists -- both of which are somewhat predictable, though still not worth giving away. Let’s just say that Sam is not quite alone.
Jones does have a deft stylistic touch; the film feels composed without being showy, and the chilly aura of the moonbase certainly comes through. None of this is particularly original, mind you, except for the fact that this is a sci-fi film made for a low budget that never betrays its price tag: One suspects that Steven Soderbergh spent many times more on his remake of Solaris and got pretty much the same look. Come to think of it, the glacial, submerged melodrama of Soderbergh’s film might make for a better comparison than the Kubrick. Save for the presence of Rockwell, who has slowly become one of our finest actors and almost saves the day here.
So why then did Moon fall so flat for me? Perhaps because it didn’t quite get to where it felt like it needed to be going. It starts off as a film about alienation, but as the story progresses, it becomes more a film about co-dependence. (It is, after all, called Moon.) But the style of the film still seems stuck in that glacial register where everything is static, haunted, and silent. This seems par for the course with “thinking man’s sci-fi” films, which suggests that genre fans will enjoy it more. But I needed something more alive.