Moon

Review: Moon

UK 2009, cert 15. Dir. Duncan Jones. 97 minutes. Cast: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey

Moon. Once in a blue one, we get intelligent, considered, beautiful science fiction movies.

Sam Rockwell rattles off a virtuoso performance as Sam Bell, a lone space-miner stuck in a small moonbase. Sam’s mind-numbing job is to keep track of the base’s largely automated systems, with only GERTIE, the base’s motherly artificial intelligence, for company. Unsurprisingly, Sam starts to go a little bonkers and winds up crashing his lunar rover. And then things get weird (I refuse to spoil this clever little movie).

Rockwell’s Bell is an endearingly optimistic guy who makes the most of his lousy lot, but he’s clearly getting a bad case of the space-crazies. Sam’s due to return to earth in two weeks’ time, desperate to reconnect with his wife and a daughter he’s never met. The base is plastered with photos of his loved ones, and Sam has spent interminable hours whittling a model town that sits proudly on some upturned crates. He’s a guy in a vacuum, desperately trying to populate his alien environment with something familiar. It’s sad, funny and touching, and Rockwell plays it magnificently. There’s a breathtaking loneliness to every sequence in which he climbs into his lightly soiled spacesuit and trundles off into the darkness. Is there any wonder the poor guy turned to whittling?

There were moments when I worried that the film was going to turn into some kind of 2001 pastiche - there’s ornate furniture sitting in a bleached white room, a bright yellow quilted spacesuit that’s straight out of Kubrick’s wardrobe and a computer that just won’t open the bloody doors. But Moon is bold enough to follow its own trajectory, with a plot that’s fascinating, creepy and moving. And Sam Rockwell... wow.

This is what science fiction is supposed to do.

9/10

-James