Moon (09, Duncan Jones)

When your primary base of cinematic style is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are generally two things that your audience will be cued into: your art direction and your profound, ostensibly befuddling message. Given its clean, white, yet mechanical ship interiors and mysterious and often WTF-inducing premise, Moon seems very deliberate in referencing the earliest benchmark. I don't mean to say that Duncan Jones' debut is indelibly linked with Kubrick's classic, but given that most buzz about the movie makes the comparison (as does the film in strange ways that I will discuss later), I think that a comparison between each film's goal might illuminate Moon.

The film's premise is a lot like what the trailer suggests. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut whose corporate sponsored gig is to monitor energy mining units on the surface of the moon. Left alone for a three year mission, Sam's only got 2 more weeks till he reunites with his wife and small child. We witness Sam sending and receiving recorded messages with his family. Oh, he also has a HAL-inspired robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey) to keep him company, a machine with HAL's electric eye but also an LCD screen that displays emoticons to simulate emotion. After an accident on the Moon's surface, Sam struggles to last out his time on the station as he descends into an increasingly bizarre conspiracy.

So, the first act orients the viewer to Sam's isolation, his extreme loneliness, the distance he feels from the world (a touching moment has him sardonically commenting to HQ that their delayed football feed almost felt "live"), and the ambiguous relationship between Sam and the corporate-built robot. Distrust of corporations, technology, the premise of renewable, clean energy as some kind of dubious redemption for mostly malevolent big business that insists on taking the human element from its employees... okay, we have a pretty wide canvas to sketch on here.

And here come the clones...

So, the film puts down another layer, the commodification of human tissue. I guess here is where we get into the "profound" stuff. Big existential crises? Check. Plot turns by the minute? Check. The film moves so fast from plot point to plot point by this time that all of the questions about the evil of corporate greed, energy, etc. fall by the wayside (did I mention that the HAL-inspired robot ends up being benevolent!?!). Duncan's simply too busy running the plot through to take time to address these things. Even though the film plays out in an increasingly gripping way as more and more of the nature of Sam's life become clear, the flick plays it out for its admittedly compelling drama rather than any of the implications. 

The film seems rather content to focus on this emotional level without doing anything with the idea that one could have clones, could be a clone. The film seems too hinged about a classic 3 act structure to do anything interesting. Instead, the film seems to fall back on the evil, faceless corporate inhumanity angle, but because the film's zipping so fast, there's really no comment there other than to say that corporations do soulless things, a message that anyone with enough consciousness to realize that her/his shoes are made in a sweatshop should have had in place before they got to the multiplex. 

There's a certain laziness to the thought behind the narrative, as if Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker decided they wanted to make a "deep" movie but forgot to fill the jar. Even the film's most brilliant idea, throwing an emoticon generator onto HAL, falls completely flat. Seeing that at once, you might think, "Wow, so when HAL turns evil, it will further expose the lack of interpersonal communication and its manipulation that the film also seems centered on." But the electric eye turns out to take a backseat to the good guy smiley faces on the display, a conclusion that seems oddly out of place in the film's insistence on humanity (and no, neither the robot nor Kevin Spacey have any real morals, they're programmed...go watch Terminator 2 already for your feel good robo kicks). 

Because of this inability to focus on any of its implications, Moon is ultimately a very beautiful and often entertaining piece of cotton candy. That the film even doesn't manage to aim as meagerly as Blade Runner in the conceptual department should ring some bells, and Moon ain't half as gorgeous as Blade Runner.