As a teenager, when I walked into a theater I was almost as excited to see the new movie trailers as I was the feature presentation. But over the years, the fifteen or so minutes of coming attractions has been steadily eclipsed by commercials or advertisements that once belonged on television, not in the cinema. Their presence has become so commonplace that during a recent viewing I didn’t even realize that the movie had started yet. It wasn’t until the commercial mentioned blooming deserts and harvesting energy from rocks on the moon that I realized this ad was the opening to Duncan Jones’s debut feature.
Moon (2009) starts with this near realistic advertisement, touting the success of Lunar Industries and its capability to harnesses the sun’s natural energy. By placing the ad at the beginning of the film, Duncan blurs the line between commerce and art. Like I said, I wasn’t sure the movie had even started yet. The faux ad resembles many of the commercials I see daily from companies like Exxon and British Petroleum. This subtle introduction also highlights two points that, although not directly addressed, are omnipresent throughout the film. First, anything in the modern world, even sunlight, can become a commodity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And second, businesses will exploit any resource to capture such a commodity.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole astronaut charged with operating the Sarang moon base owned by Lunar Industries and sending the energy-packed canisters back to earth. If you think it’s strange that a company would only employ one individual for such an important task, you are right. But Sam is not totally alone. When he isn’t spending his free time building models or working out, Sam passes the time conversing with his on-board computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey).
As we meet Sam, he is ending a three-year contract on the moon base, eagerly awaiting a reunion with his earth-bound wife Tess (Dominique McElligott). It becomes clear that Sam’s tenure in space is finally catching up to him. He starts hallucinating, which culminates with Sam crashing his moon rover into one of the harvesting machines. When he wakes up in the infirmary, Sam doesn’t have a scratch on his head, and as he begins to investigate, he quickly learns that there are some strange things occurring on Sarang. Although the film’s narrative doesn’t rely on plot twists, I’ll leave it at that.
After watching the film, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Duncan Jones studied philosophy in college. It has been widely noted that the film owes a lot to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solyaris, but the true inspiration lies in Jones’s philosophical background. Bertrand Russell once said, “Nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.” This concept is not new to cinema and it appears to have provided the basis for many science fiction films, most notably Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998). In Moon, Jones contemplates the same question, and the result is a compelling narrative that poses some serious questions. Questions that we might not have to answer now but with burgeoning developments in genetics and stem cell research they are questions we will have to answer some day.
* * * *
1 comment:
It's obvious that Jones was influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey and I was afraid going into the film that it would end up being 2001: Lite. I was pleasantly surprised that he focused more on the open-ended questions of humanity and memory (as you point out in your review). While 2001 takes an enormous perspective on the bounds of human history, Moon is incredibly subdued. I think the central theme of the film is the search for what gives our lives meaning. For the energy corporations, the driving force is obviously power and wealth. For Sam Bell, it is the illusion of his perfect family back on earth. When this facade is revealed, he loses grasp of reality. Sam Rockwell does a nice job portraying this internal conflict with an understated, believable performance. I wish the film dug a little deeper into the psyche of the central characters, but I still left the theater with considerable questions on my mind.
Post a Comment