Beside Himself—a review of Moon
Written by Nathan Parker from a story by Duncan Jones
Directed by Duncan Jones
Starring Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott
What do you do if you need a human being to do a job which may kill him? As humans extend their reach into space, this question will become more and more acute. Do we send robots to do the job? Fine, but what if they can’t? What if the limits of artificial intelligence fall far short of the limits of natural intelligence? What if the job calls for intuition, instinct, or imagination? We’ll have to send humans. And some of them will have accidents. How high a price are we willing to pay?
That’s the central moral question behind Moon, a fine movie from director Duncan Jones. This is only his second feature, but Jones shows a good appreciation for the quiet, understated moment that lets the viewer fill in the gap. Son of pop icon David Bowie (whose real surname is Jones), this movie proves that he surely grew up listening to “Space Oddity” (“This is ground control to Major Tom”). The central premise is ripped from the headlines: Earth needs clean energy. Helium-3, a major component of fusion technology, is abundant on the moon but rare on Earth. A Japanese consortium has built a mining facility on the far side of the moon (for no reason explained in the movie) where giant robotic machines trawl their way across the surface, strip-mining it of the trapped helium. Everything is automated and pre-programmed, but just in case something goes wrong, there has to be a human on site.
Enter Sam Bell, nearing the end of his three-year contract. He’s getting more than a little antsy; he’s talking to himself, and he has formed a close relationship with a semi-mobile computer AI named Gerty (voice of Kevin Spacey, K-PAX). Some of us will immediately be reminded of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the resemblances end there. Gerty is much more sympathetic, right down to the smiley faces it uses to convey “emotion”. But it’s not the same, and the fact that a communications satellite has been down for a while, reducing all communication with Earth to video recordings, is working Sam’s last nerve. When he goes out to fix a stalled mining machine, a hallucination distracts him, and he crashes into the trawler.
And then wakes up in the infirmary. I knew exactly what had happened, and it didn’t take long for Sam to confirm that all is not as it seems now. What happened to the burn on his hand? Why is Sam suddenly younger-looking and more energetic? Why have his dress and hygiene habits suddenly improved? Why is one of the space suits missing? Why are the airlocks all locked against him? Most suspiciously of all, why is Gerty refusing to let him out of the habitat? A persistent nagging at Sam’s memory, coupled with a startling dream, spurs him to trick Gerty. He takes off in a rover, finds the crash, and finds… himself. He carries the barely-alive Sam I back to base and puts him in the infirmary. What follows is a virtual one-man tour de force from Sam Rockwell (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), as Sam I and Sam II work out an uneasy partnership. It’s clear that they are the victims of a massive fraud, that the Company they work for has lied to them, and may have done worse. Gerty shows the limits of his programming, as he is unable to answer most of their questions as to the who and what of their situation.
I had some problems with the early stages of this middle portion of the movie. If I woke up and found a double of myself standing in the room, hysterics would be the order of the day. Sam I does not even seem very curious about his clone. None of the questions normal for this situation seemed to occur to him. Eventually, I realized that one of two things was going on: either the writer was a lunatic, or we were being told subtly that cloning is part of Sam’s world, and his question is not whether or how he was cloned, but why. I appreciate Parker’s nuanced script, but I think this part could have used a little flat out, un-subtle exposition.
Just watching Sam deal with this crisis would have been interesting enough, but Parker raises the stakes by having the Company send a “rescue team” to deal with the wrecked miner—and by implication, erase the problem created by Sam’s discovery of his clone. There is some predictable conflict between the Sams to figure out who has priority—which is the original, and which the copy? More importantly, which one of them gets the wife they both love? Talk about your existential search for authenticity! The Sams come to an uneasy peace, and collaborate on a trip outside the habitat to find out why their communications with Earth are so screwed up. They find giant towers located beyond their normal working area, presumably to jam communications. Sam I gets sick and returns to base, where he vomits blood and loses teeth. This makes him suspicious enough to do some research in the archives, and with Gerty’s help, he discovers a terrible secret—not only is he not the “original” of which Sam II is the clone, neither of them may be. There is only one worker on this job, and it’s the same Sam, time after time. When his three years are up, he gets into a “cryosleep” box which turns out to be an incinerator, and another clone is awakened. Together with Sam I, he finds the real basement of the habitat, along with hundreds of sleeping Sams.
At which point they both realize that, like The Highlander, there can be only one Sam alive when the rescue team arrives in a few hours. Together, they must come up with a scheme that not only prevents the team from killing one or both of them, but gets the message back to Earth about the stupendous fraud being perpetrated here on the far side. The solution is neat, characteristic, unique—and tragic.
The trouble with this script is that it requires its audience to be both smart and stupid. We have to recognize the symptoms of radiation poisoning in multiple editions of Sam, without any exposition. However, we apparently are supposed to forget that gravity is the same all over the moon. Indoors, Sam walks around normally, even fights and runs and jumps rope normally, but outdoors suddenly he is subject to the moon’s 1/6 gravity and does those little bunny hops we see in the Apollo videos from forty years ago. We get some hoary cliches that belong more in the realm of fantasy than science fiction, such as the idea of a clone as a photocopy of an adult, with all the original’s memories. Gerty seems wildly inconsistent—he can go beyond his programming to help Sam discover the truth of his situation, but can’t rescue Sam I on his own.
The art direction is good enough, but I thought the space-station-as-sterile-waiting-room look went out with 2001. And what designer in his right mind builds in door sills designed to trip people? The station has a lived-in look, and the addition of an ordinary leather lounge chair for Sam is brilliant, but much of it looks cheap and plastic. Which, given what we learn about the Company, tells us something valuable: they don’t put much money into maintaining their assets. Even if one of them is a man doing a dangerous job. External scenes of the rovers and other mining machines grinding their way across the lunar surface are convincing, although the production staff seems to have taken “dark side of the moon” too literally; “dark side” is relative to the view from Earth. If you’re actually on the side of the moon facing away from Earth, when the Earth side is dark, you’re subject to brilliant sunshine, not twilit gloom. I wish people who do science fiction movies would do a little basic research. This movie was screened for NASA; did no one listen to their comments? However, if what I read is true, the special effects budget for this movie was a stunningly paltry $5 million, which means this is possibly the most cost-effective use of FX I have ever seen. It certainly looks like it cost more.
Jones’ direction shows a surer hand than I would have expected from a second-time auteur. The pace is slow, perhaps slower than an audience conditioned to science fiction action movies that move at the speed of light is used to. This is not the movie to see right after, say, Star Trek. This is a movie for thinking people, a cerebral exploration of identity and memory that has much in common with, say, Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant and funny short story “Seventh Voyage”, in which a stranded astronaut uses time travel to “clone” himself so he can fix his starship. Moon is (mostly) science fiction, without the Star Trek magic/fantasy of teleportation and faster-than-light travel.
Most of all, it’s a tour-de-force for the brilliant and talented Sam Rockwell. He creates a different character for each Sam, which is somehow the same man but… not. His onscreen duet is seamless; it is easy to forget that this is only one actor, not twins. Each man goes through his own character arc, each one winds up, after only a few hours together, diverging along separate stories and concerns. Rockwell pulls off a bravura performance, worth watching for itself alone.
We don’t see enough “hard” science fiction any more—it asks too much of its audience, apparently. But this movie will surely fall into “classic” status. Like the best science fiction in any flavor, it ultimately comes down to character. Action, special effects, and plot are all important, but Sam Bell is what makes this movie good.
Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Stegall