Moon

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this film. I knew it was kind of a space-themed movie, but I wasn’t sure if it was like Aliens or like Event Horizon (my favorite movie of the space-genre). Did it have monsters? Suspense? Lasers? Explosions? Flash-frozen humans that shatter? It doesn’t have any of those things, actually, yet, it’s a decent film.

Moon is set in the not-too-distant future where a company had developed a way to mine energy from the radiation found in moon rock. The company has set up a base on the moon and has manned it with one guy (Sam Bell) who lives up there for three years at a time. He maintains contact with his bosses with a non-live (or delayed) video/audio feed to his bosses and to his wife and family. He records various messages and sends them back and then watches their video feeds when they arrive. He occupies his time with building a model of a town he used to live in from earth and also working out, reading, and watching old television shows.

On board is a service robot (with the cool monotone voice of Kevin Spacey) named Gertie. Gertie takes care of the operations, listens to Sam talk when he needs to vent, and takes care of medical things. It’s a very efficient system. Sam has to go out to one of the giant mining machines to collect the energy capsule and while he’s out there driving on the moon, he crashes his rover into the mining machine. Sam wakes up in the infirmary with Gertie tending him and telling him he’s had an accident while checking on the mining machine. Then things start to get weird. Weird and depressing.

This movie doesn’t have a lot of action in it. I’m pretty sure that’s the point of it all. It’s about a guy stuck on the moon for three years at a time and trying not to go crazy in the meantime. It’s supposed to be long and drawn out and depressing and gloomy and sterile. The more Sam Bell finds out about why he’s here on the moon base, the more he realizes how expendable he is to the company that employs him. I don’t think there’s a moral or a point to this movie, but it was well done and well acted. There aren’t a lot of characters in this movie, so I think once they found one that worked (Sam Rockwell), they just had him do everything. The film is worth seeing, but I realized I was more depressed than I thought afterwards and didn’t talk for like 4 hours. Weird.