Moon
There are two great traditions in Science Fiction. Technology vs Human Nature, and the Question of Identity. Moon seems to belong to the second, but I think that’s a smokescreen. I think it belongs to the first.
The Question of Identity was not invented by Phillip K. Dick, it was invented in a roundabout way by Plato who put the question to his audience in The Cave. The Cave doesn’t question identity, it questions reality, but the two are directly related. Both focus on the issue of knowledge and it’s a very short road from “how do I know what is real?” to “how do I know who I am?”
PKD, however, perfected it and for reasons that would require smarter people than I to explicate, his themes about identity and reality became the pervasive theme in Science Fiction film over the last 25 years. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Matrix. In a sense, any SF Noir must be a PDK story because the principle element of Noir is a main character who can no longer know what’s right and what’s wrong. Who’s good and who’s bad. Who he can trust…. From there, being unable to trust your own identity is a short jump. It’s so ubiquitous that it takes a movie like Moon to remind us that, hey, there’s a whole other major theme in SF.
The reason we forget about it, of course, is 2001. Kubrik summed over every element of the theme so effectively that it closed the book on it. We’d get a few other entries in the genre. Silent Running is a great example. But overall, we’ve not seen the idea explored in a serious way since Kubrick’s masterpiece. A lot of the original Star Trek is concerned with the issue.
We’re not afraid of technology anymore, is another problem. There was a time, pretty much from the 1938 World’s Fair up until the 1960s, when most Americans and I daresay people in the West as a whole, looked at Technology as the savior of man. The application of Science that would solve all our problems. It’s one of the things that made 2001 so chillingly effective. Roger Ebert put HAL on his list of the best villains in all of film. Because he saw it when it came out and he grew up during the period when everyone just trusted technology. “We all thought computers were going to come and solve all our problems,” he wrote. “So it was a terrifying moment that challenged everything I’d been raised to believe when it suddenly dawned on you that everyone on board the Discovery was dependent on HAL for life…and HAL was not on their side!”
2001′s major theme is how man deals with his creations. What happens when we transition from our Earthly home, where we are the masters of all we survey and we control technology, into space, where we become like infants as a species and have to learn to walk and eat and shit all over again? When we have to depend on our technology, allowing it to control us. Kubrik said; bad things happen.
Moon is obviously in this same vein, explores the same theme of Technology vs Human Nature. And like 2001, Moon’s future is clinical. It’s clean and well-ordered. A future we haven’t seen in a while. Ridley Scott decided “I think the future is going to look like the present. Everything’s going to be shit,” and we’ve all gone along with that for 30 years now. Moon rejects that and returns us to a pre-Alien future. Yay! The Silent Running comparison will seem apt to you, I suspect, as a lot of the movie is given over to shots of rovers and robots moving around. Moon and Wall-E, two recent movies influenced by that film.
But there the comparison ends. Moon is about how quickly technology changes…and how slowly human nature changes. We control how our technology evolves, we cannot control how we evolve. We can make devices better than we are, but we cannot make ourselves better. We are still subject to sixty-million years of instinct. Of fear and anxiety.
This is a fundamentally ironic movie and here I’m using the term literally, meaning that which is poignantly in opposition to what is expected. “Isn’t it sad,” the movie asks, “that we can achieve so much so quickly with our tools, that we can make such fantastic things and master the entire universe, but we’re still victims to our own nature?”
Moon is all about “we can do this, yes. But should we?” I didn’t really know what the plot of Moon was, when the lights went down. I’d not read any reviews, I’d not even seen a trailer. As a result, I had no real understanding of what kind of film I was in for. If you can avoid it, I suggest the same.
About 20 minutes into it I began to wonder seriously if I was watching the most important SF movie since 2001. The answer, of course, is no. And here I have to lay the blame, if blame there be, at the feet of the director and the guy who came up with the story, Duncan Jones. I say “if blame there be” because it’s still a fine movie.
Jones wanted to work with Sam Rockwell but Rockwell wasn’t interested in doing the movie Jones had in mind. During their meeting, they started talking about SF movies, the movies they (and I) grew up with from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Movies like Alien and The Thing. SF movies starring character actors, not movie stars. Rockwell loved those movies because they felt so real, because they were created to showcase really good actors who otherwise don’t get enough screentime to show what they can do.
Well, that’s not a problem here. Rockwell is the only dude on camera for the entire movie. After their discussion, Jones went away and created the story of Moon, with Rockwell as the only character, and then named the character after him. Sam.
This explains why the movie cannot bring itself to answer any of the questions it raises. It puts a really interesting SF premise in front of you, but Jones’ interest in working with Rockwell seems to have translated into an affection for his character that protects him from anything too awful happening. It seems like the movie is about Paranoia and Fear and Isolation, but when the technological problem arises (and here, the problem is with biological technology…I’ll say no more) the movie can’t reach its own conclusions and instead goes for populism.
Rockwell plays Sam Bell who’s on a mining station on the far side of the moon. He’s been there three years and his time is almost up. When we meet him, he’s started to hallucinate. Or has he? Because he’s been in isolation for three years. Or has he?
The setup, lacking any monster or other distracting element like you got in Sunshine, is pure SF. Initially I wondered “is this really a science-fiction movie?” So if you’re wondering if I think about these things while I’m sitting in the theater, you have your answer.
The answer is yes, but alas it never goes anywhere. If it had been just about Sam going slowly insane on the moon, it would not have been, as that could happen in any number of places or times in real human history. But adding the SF element raises dozens of questions that can only be addressed in SF.
There is one long special effect prominant throughout the film and it’s done so well there was only really one moment when I was reminded I was looking an an sfx. And it seemed like a little money was saved in the modeling or CGI or whatever they used for the exteriors of the Moon. But these are minor quibbles. Some elements were handled particulary deftly. There’s a classic set-up used in all stories of this type, in which a character is deliberately injured by the plot for reasons revealed later. Here, that plot point is trotted out, but it happens in service to a completely different plot-point, and so we don’t even realize it. Sam burns his hand, but does so while he’s hallucinating, and so we don’t get the Chekov’s Gun moment where you wonder “what was the point of that scene where he burned his hand?” Knowing it will be important later.
Rockwell is so good, so perfect at playing disorientation and paranoia that when things start to get really weird, we cannot know if we are seeing what we think we’re seeing. Yes, the movie plays with the Identity Problem, but only for about 10 minutes and then moves on. The movies goes very quickly from “Is this real?” To “yes, now what?”
Because Rockwell is the only actor, there’s not much to talk about besides his performance. That’s the reason the movie is something of a let-down, it was made for him, and there’s not much in it besides him. Not much plot, not much drama, not much insight.
Overall it’s an interesting film, but since it can’t bring itself to tackle the really tough SF questions it raises, we’re left with a showcase for a great character actor.
Given my opinion of Rockwell as an actor, it’s worth it.
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June 18th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
<p>Congratulations: You’ve made me want to rewatch <em>Solyaris</em>, an ordeal I had resolved to never re-experience, despite the rewards.</p><p>As far as Moon goes, a one-man show made into a movie sounds avant-garde enough that I can bring myself to see it. We are allowed to consume media that isn’t SF without being exiled from the tribe, right?</p>
June 18th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Are you kidding? I’ve got an epic post percolating here about the ten most important movie musicals.
July 4th, 2009 at 11:50 am
MOON finally opened here yesterday and I caught it as soon as I could. Loved it. While it’s not quite the game-changer maybe it could’ve been, I thought it was brilliant. It offers the Twilight Zone-style twist in ten minutes, then spends its time dealing with repercussions, all while answering profound SF questions with mundane, very human, very relatable answers. It plays with expectations constantly, from the situation, to the robot, to when we will be given the answers we do and do not expect.
It’s also very clever with its VFX budget, which I can appreciate.
I wonder how much going into it with the knowledge that it was written for the actor changes your experience, though. I knew that Jones and Rockwell had gotten together to do an ALIEN-style blue-collar SF flick, but I didn’t realize that Rockwell was originally approached for something else. Interesting.