"Moon" review (no spoilers)
Nov. 6th, 2009 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matthewdalyThere's an old joke about the factory of the future. It will be fully automated and have only one button in it, and it will be crewed by a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog, and the dog's job will be to make sure that the man never presses the button.
"Moon" is an essentially one-man exploration of this joke. Sam Bell (well played by Sam Rockwell) is the lone overseer of a helium-3 mining operation on the dark side of the moon, providing the fusion fuel that powers 70% of the Earth below. He's nearly at the end of his 3-year contract, and his only companion in that time has been Gerty, a robot assistant who communicates through a HAL-like monotone and a small monitor showing one of about five different emoticons. The base itself is dingy and ill-maintained by The Corporation; and a large part of the isolation Sam feels is brought on by the fact that the long-range transmitter is broken and he can't communicate in real-time with his wife and infant daughter or even with the managers who seem unmoved by the repairs that the base needs. Under all the isolation, even so close to returning to Earth, Sam starts to break down, and the "race against time" begins.
Except not so much. The trailer really undersells how interesting the movie is. It is very slowly paced (think about the pace of 2001 itself and you won't be far off), and it is so languorous that I had no trouble guessing nearly everything that would happen twenty minutes in advance. But that's okay, because the story is so well told and I also guessed many things that didn't happen. Gerty's character stands out most welcomely in a large and growing crowd of artificial intelligence that just might be plotting our deaths behind the mask of their serene UI.
97 minutes. Rated R. (Some intense scenes and some gore, but it didn't bother tender me who was even grossed out by the armoured polar bear fight in Golden Compass. Probably mostly for the frequent but not surprising F-bombs and Sam Rockwell full backal nudity.)
"Moon" is an essentially one-man exploration of this joke. Sam Bell (well played by Sam Rockwell) is the lone overseer of a helium-3 mining operation on the dark side of the moon, providing the fusion fuel that powers 70% of the Earth below. He's nearly at the end of his 3-year contract, and his only companion in that time has been Gerty, a robot assistant who communicates through a HAL-like monotone and a small monitor showing one of about five different emoticons. The base itself is dingy and ill-maintained by The Corporation; and a large part of the isolation Sam feels is brought on by the fact that the long-range transmitter is broken and he can't communicate in real-time with his wife and infant daughter or even with the managers who seem unmoved by the repairs that the base needs. Under all the isolation, even so close to returning to Earth, Sam starts to break down, and the "race against time" begins.
Except not so much. The trailer really undersells how interesting the movie is. It is very slowly paced (think about the pace of 2001 itself and you won't be far off), and it is so languorous that I had no trouble guessing nearly everything that would happen twenty minutes in advance. But that's okay, because the story is so well told and I also guessed many things that didn't happen. Gerty's character stands out most welcomely in a large and growing crowd of artificial intelligence that just might be plotting our deaths behind the mask of their serene UI.
97 minutes. Rated R. (Some intense scenes and some gore, but it didn't bother tender me who was even grossed out by the armoured polar bear fight in Golden Compass. Probably mostly for the frequent but not surprising F-bombs and Sam Rockwell full backal nudity.)
