Duncan Jones's Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the sole human being employed at a mining station at the title location by a corporation called Lunar Industries. Sam is weeks away from completing a three-year stint that will end with the arrival of his replacement and his return to Earth. He's settled into a hermit's existence, kibbutzing with "Gerty", an all-purpose computer gofer with the voice of Kevin Spacey, letting his hair and beard grow out for weeks at a time, then getting a shave and a haircut to check in with his family and company masters back on Earth via telescreen conferences. Then...something happens. It would be unfair to give too many plot details away, since Moon, with its limited cast and scenic options, needs all the surprises it can hold in reserve. But the movie does turn on the idea that, in the future, technological advances will make work in space routine, grubby, even tedious, and that the corporations on whose behalf this work is performed may regard their intergalactic labor force less as Buck Rogers heroes than as insects whose air supply can easily be cut off if they present any inconveniences. In interviews, Jones has gone out of his way to pay tribute to the movies that plowed this line of speculation in the past, including 2001 but also such later sci-fi films as Silent Running, Alien, and Outland. Back in Kubrick's day, the idea that anything about life in outer space could ever become so routinized that it might become boring was a fresh joke, and even then, there were scenes in 2001 that maybe went beyond the call of duty in showing just how boring things in space could get. (There's a reason that it's not easy to recall, just of the top of your head, what's the second best movie starring either Keir Dullea or Gary Lockwood.) It takes a special kind of genius to depict tedium without seeming tedious, and in fact, tedium is something that Moon has plenty of.

Read More...

As digital effects become cheaper and more accessible, more independent filmmakers have been able to tackle genre films that would have been unavailable to them a few decades ago. Consider the upcoming film Moon- whereas a big-budget movie about a long-term lunar mission might colonize the titular orb with a crew that spans multiple races and age groups, newcomer Duncan Jones’ film basically tells the story of one man played by Sam Rockwell, alone on the moon with only a robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and occasional transmissions from Earth to keep him company. Of course, a role like this requires a particular kind of actor, and Rockwell looks pretty perfect here, being the sort of performer who always begins to start with a screw loose only to gradually lose more as the stories progress. The premise of the film seems to owe something of a debt to Solaris (pick one), but one hopes that Jones will find an interesting wrinkle on it. If nothing else, it looks like Rockwell came to play, which is more than we can say about his bland work in last year’s Frost/Nixon.

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.