Film review: Moon. Verdict? A visual and intellectual treat.

We watched Moon in the IFI yesterday. Here’s the trailer:

Sci-fi can be hard to do. Hard to create, hard to watch, hard to be enthusiastic about. There’s so much that can go wrong - a cgi overdose, over elaborate plots, characters or effects, unconvincing characters, a difficult premise - that it relegates the genre to the shelves beside the horror and away from the serious films.

Approaching any sci-fi film that doesn’t have a huge budget, JJ Abrams as a director and a sterling cast with trepidation seems a sensible thing to do. Luckily director Duncan Jones has managed to avoid all of the potential pitfalls with a masterful control over the story and character of Sam Bell, as played by Sam Rockwell.

I’ll put it to you this way - it took me about ten minutes or so to remember that what I was watching wasn’t actually shot on the moon.

This is a film that thought went into. The main character is incredibly convincing - “3 years is a long haul. It’s way, way, way, way, way too long, if you know what I mean.” The set is functional and credible as a mining station. The companion, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) that you see in the trailer is no AI creation - it’s a computer suspended from the ceiling, programmed to react to its users commands.

The moon vehicles are basically tractors and combine harvesters for space - they’re not even as stylish as the shuttles in Star Trek. There’s a grey dust that clings to everything and sets a visual tone for the film, that infects the watcher as much as the character.

From the very opening “Where are we now?”, explaining the idea of the film, the harvesting of fusion energy, the secret of the dark side of the moon to the first incident where the film really takes off, there’s a visual treat that’s extremely enjoyable.

I sat and let it wash over me, enjoying the little storyline features that you knew would probably loom large later on. Small details like that alarm tone (hilarious really), like well placed post-its, like photographs and microwavable food, like pens and knives and screwdrivers - the filmmakers haven’t set out to make you believe that everything changes in the future - they’ve just gone for simple, realistic tools. It’s a risk they took but one I feel that paid off for them.

The synopsis is pretty much as the trailer lays it out. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s new primary source of energy, Helium-3. It’s a lonely job, made more difficult by a broken satellite link that prevents any live communication to home. Taped video messages are all Sam can send and receive, and he co-exists with a benign but not-too-amazing robot/computer called Gerty.

However, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. Suddenly though his health starts to deteriorate.

Painful headaches, hallucinations and a lack of focus lead to an almost fatal accident on a routine drive on the moon in a lunar rover. While recuperating back at the base (with no memory of how he got there), Sam discovers a younger, angrier version of himself, who claims to be there to fulfill the same three year contract Sam started all those years ago.

Confined with what appears to be a clone of his earlier self, and with a support crew on its way to help put the base back into productive order, Sam is fighting the clock to discover what’s going on and where he fits into company plans and what they want from him.

What I loved about this film was how serious and simple the film director seems to have taken it. This is no nerd- or geek-fest, no science-laden film, neither is it a philosophical, moralistic tale. It’s a guy, on a space station, that could to all intents and purposes be in the Sahara Desert, who is faced with problems and the film follows him on this journey.

Jones never allowed the movie to become a frivolous film, never allowed it to escape from his vision:

I have always been a fan of science fiction films. In my mind, the golden age of SF cinema was the ‘70s, early ‘80s, when films like Silent Running, Alien, Blade Runner and Outland told human stories in future environments.

I’ve always wanted to make a film that felt like it could fit into that canon. There are unquestionably less of those kind of sci-fi films these days. I don’t know why. I have a theory though: I think over the last couple of decades filmmakers have allowed themselves to become a bit embarrassed by SF’s philosophical side.

It’s OK to “geek out” at the cool effects and “oooh” and “ahh” at amazing vistas, but we’re never supposed to take it too seriously. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that SF should be frivolous, for teenage boys.

We’re told that the old films, the Outlands and Silent Runnings, were too plaintive, too whiney. I think that’s ridiculous. People who appreciate science fiction want the best for the world, but they understand that there is an education to be had by investigating the worst of what might happen.

That’s why Blade Runner was so brilliant; it used the future to make us look at basic human qualities from a fresh perspective. Empathy. Humanity. How do you define these things? I wanted to address those questions.

For a simple film, there’s a lot to take in with Moon, but I never felt overwhelmed by it - in fact I found it extremely interesting. If a company that the world was dependent on could get away with whatever it liked, how far would it go to maximise profits and keep costs down? What decisions would they make to ensure that their investment was secure? Would the price of human life be too much?

Sam Rockwell is superb in the film. Extremely believable in all his roles (those that have seen it will know what I mean), he never strays into over acting, preferring to keep us on tenterhooks as we find out whether he’s imagining it all or if the reality he is experiencing will turn out to be real.

Rockwell, previously in Frost/Nixon, The Assasination of Jess James by the Coward Robert Ford, Heist, Charlie’s Angels and The Green Mile kept me glued to the screen in his portrayal of Bell and had the distinct talent to make me hope for the success of one side of his character and for the demise of another.

His interactions with the set, with the other characters and with himself is so integral to how much I loved this movie, that I’d happily go see it again. There’s a wonderful scene, an admission that was very touching - “I’m real lonely. Will you shake my hand?” “Maybe later” - that seems simple but is incredibly complex, but hepulled it off with considerable and impressive ease. In fact the film was actually written for him.

“There is a reason why “indie” and “science fiction” are rarely seen together in the same sentence,” observes MOON director Duncan Jones.

“Sci-fi by its very nature often demands the biggest production values, and, as you can imagine, that’s the hardest thing to achieve with an indie budget. So putting MOON together was an intricate puzzle: we wanted to tell a story that was both intimately human but universal in appeal; we wanted to keep our cast small and our shooting environment completely controllable; and we wanted to get every last drop of screen value out of our visual effects.

It was hugely ambitious, but it paid off—we made an honest-to-goodness science fiction film, with an intense story, an amazing performance by an extraordinary actor, chock-full of gorgeous special effects, and we did it in 33 days and on a small budget.”

This isn’t an adventure, an indulgence of effects and visual computer wizardry. It’s a story well told and believable. It’s about the loneliness, the human side of someone just doing a job and doing his best to succeed. It’s about the things that can go wrong and sometimes do in your mind. It’s about learning who you are under extreme circumstances. It’s seeing another side to yourself. It’s not anything new - anything overtly “science fiction“. It’s part of the story. The moon itself? It looks beautiful. There is a shot of the earth in the distance that is spectacular:

“As a bible for the look of the lunar exteriors, we relied on Full Moon by Michael Light, an amazing collection of NASA photos from the Apollo missions, filled with beautiful, high-contrast 70mm photography of the moon from both space and its surface. It gave me a very clear idea of what I wanted the exteriors of our film to look like.

We worked with Bill Pearson, model genius of Alien fame, to create live-action models and sections of lunar landscape for our vehicles to run across, and then with the help of the fantastic London special-effects house Cinesite, we enhanced the models and digitally extended the landscapes.”

Would I recommend Moon? Very much so. Definitely one of the best films I’ve seen this year and extremely suited to the quietness and not-as-many-scumbags environments of the IFI. I was surprised actually that the screen wasn’t more full, but I’d imagine as word spreads it will become a hit. There are certain story features too that have kept me wondering - and people who have seen it will know what I mean when I wonder who is the man that’s called during a phone call. What happens after the final delivery to Earth? Is there more to Gerty than we’re told or than Gerty even knows?

There’s a lovely quote by the director that I’ll leave you with. It strongly resonates with me because I think that’s exactly what will happen - I know it did for me:

“I want people to leave the theatre tapping away on their iPhones, looking up Helium-3 as a potential fuel for fusion power generation, and discussing the prospects of Lunar mining.

I want sci-fi geeks to be jumping around excitedly, chattering about how cool we made the rovers, harvesters and base.

I want the romantics to be teary-eyed, having a little shared moment with the people they love, or calling them up if they are far away.

But most important, I want people who love movies to say, “That was pretty damn good. I wonder what these guys are going to do next…”“