Moon: A Review
June 21st, 2009It is as we all feared. David Bowie has sired a race of warrior/poets that will make us all obsolete. And their first task was to make the best hard sci-fi movie since Gattaca.
I’m always torn with particularly good movies between just presenting the few facts you need to know (Sam Rockwell, on the Moon, meets himself, directed by Duncan Jones, who is the son of David Bowie.) and going on at length about it until I’ve thoroughly ruined the film for everyone who hasn’t seen it. But here I really can’t talk about much of anything because a large part of the brilliance of Moon is that it isn’t the movie you think it will be. It isn’t Solaris. It isn’t 2001. It’s a psychological sci-fi film so the comparison is apt in a way, but the cheap twists you keep expecting never come and the magical solution made of bad science and plot necessity never arrives to usher in Act III.
This is a movie about a guy, on the moon, who meets himself without any gimmicks or shocking twists. I know that must seem like a contradiction; after all, the premise itself sounds like a gimmick. But, unlike most sci-fi movies, Moon treats it’s fantastic premise as mundane. This has happened to the characters, and they don’t stand around for the rest of the movie as shocked and confused as the audience is. Solaris is a movie about, “What the hell is going on?” Moon is a film that asks, “Where do we go from here?”, and that’s a question only the best science fiction seems to bother answering.