His Take/Her Take: Moon

Worth the price of admission, or a waste of time? Brian McKechnie and Suzanne Ellis offer you their take on the latest movies hitting screens. Read their reviews every week, exclusively on CityNews.ca.

Let Brian and Suzanne know what you think of His Take/Her Take via email at brian.mckechnie@citynews.ca or suzanne.ellis@citynews.ca .

MOON

Rated PG-13
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey
Directed by: Duncan Jones
Official Site IMDb

When astronaut Sam Bell is about to wrap up a three-year solo job on the moon he finds out he’s not alone after all.

Brian’s Take

**** out of 5 stars

It’d be easy to compare Moon to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But when I left the theatre I had the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film Solaris on the brain. And when my cohort below and I got to talking about what we had just seen, Silent Running came up (starring the great Bruce Dern). Then I heard it straight from director Duncan Jones’s Twitter voice; his biggest inspiration for Moon was the 1981 Sean Connery/Peter Boyle feature Outland. Outland? I don’t recall that being any good? Doesn’t matter, the point is that all of those films had vision and helped shaped what Moon is, and all those films deserve to be watched at least once (just like Moon).

After spending close to three years alone on the moon mining Helium-3, a gas used to create energy on Earth, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) begins to see someone else on his base with him. Someone who looks identical to him. GERTY, his computerized assistant (voiced by Kevin Spacey) claims he doesn’t see anyone else. Is GERTY programmed to lie? Or is Sam losing his mind from the isolation?

Although the low-fi moon set is impressive (budget was around $5 million), the film is all Rockwell all the time. Let’s start the Oscar race early and put his name down as a nominee now (put the movie and Duncan Jones down while you’re at). His portrayal of the solitary Sam Bell is outstanding. When he shows up again as a different version of himself it’s like watching two different actors onscreen and you forget they’re both Rockwell. The man is a genius and I have an entirely new level of respect for him.

Being the son of David Bowie, arguably one of the most creative musicians on the planet, probably helped open Duncan Jones’s imagination up to an entire new level as a child. Even though Moon is his first feature film he was a celebrated commercial director for many years. His vision and style puts him in a league of his own (like Kubrick or Tarkovsky). The one question I do have is why he kept his father out of the film. Spacey did a great job as the HAL 9000 inspired voice of GERTY but it would have been a whole other ballgame if Bowie took it on.

Moon proves that a good movie is made from a compelling story with solid directing and acting and not from a ton of cash. Like the films it’s inspired by it’s sure to leave an impression with the audience for a long time to come. It might not sit well with you at first but once you digest it you’ll see how powerful it is and will want to tell everyone to see it.

Suzanne’s Take

**** out of 5 stars

Moon is a spare, haunting film in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and Silent Running – the kind of thoughtful sci-fi that’s painfully absent from movie screens of late.

Set in the near future, when Earth relies on Helium-3 harvested from the moon’s soil for its energy needs, one man is stationed on a lonely lunar outpost to make sure the operation runs smoothly. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three-year contract, over the course of which his only real communication with other humans has been recorded video messages from his wife and daughter, and he’s counting down the days (and probably the hours and minutes) until he flies home to be reunited with them.

Sam does have one companion – the computer GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey. GERTY is an obvious nod to HAL 9000 from 2001, and Spacey even seems to be channeling his inner Douglas Rain (who provided HAL’s voice in the Stanley Kubrick film) in his unnervingly calm delivery, made somewhat comical by emoticons that pop up on the computer screen, which run the gamut from happy, to quizzical, to sympathetic.

As Sam approaches his end date, his health begins to deteriorate – from headaches and stomach problems to hallucinations, and one such vision causes him to crash his transport vehicle. Things really start to take a turn for the bizarre when, during his recuperation, he discovers another version of himself. Suddenly, he has questions, lots of questions, and GERTY is either unable or unwilling to answer them.

Moon is essentially a one-performance film, and as the increasingly confused Sam, Rockwell is phenomenal. The scenes where he’s acting opposite himself are utterly believable, and he shows an emotional depth and range that he arguably hasn’t had the chance to exhibit before now. It’s by far his meatiest film role to date, and could very well translate into a nomination come Oscar time.

The major discovery in Moon, however, is that of writer-director Duncan Jones. Jones, who happens to be David Bowie’s son, wrote the story for Moon with Rockwell in mind (the actor is apparently a sci-fi nut), and passed it along to Nathan Parker who wrote the screenplay. There’s not a lot of dialogue, but there doesn’t need to be in such an intimate story, and thanks to Jones’s keen sense of direction, the suspenseful film moves along at a good pace.

This is Jones’s first feature-length picture, and it’s an impressive one all around especially given that shooting was completed in 33 days. It’s also hard to believe in looking at the finished work, from the coldly beautiful lunar landscapes to the beat-up space station, that it only cost US$5 million to make.

The references here are obvious, from the aforementioned 2001: A Space Odyssey, S olaris, and Silent Running, to Alien, Blade Runner, and Outland. But where in a lesser film they could have seemed like rip-offs, here they’re more of a homage to what Jones calls the golden age of sci-fi (the ’70s and ’80s). Moon‘s future is a grimy, imperfect one – the spacesuits are dusty, the walls scuffed, plants grow in makeshift pots made with aluminum foil. And the whole film has a washed-out look to it. Adding to the sense of foreboding, Clint Mansell’s eerie score, which stayed with me long after the film ended.

Moon feels familiar, yet fresh — a loving tribute to the classics of sci-fi, but a film that deserves to stand on its own.