Moon

Before I walked in to see this film, I had read praise from every area of the internet saying that this film would "redefine the genre of science fiction" and that it was a "well crafted masterpiece." Naturally, I kept a level head when going to see it for myself, but as the credits rolled, I couldn't really see what all the fuss was about.

The film follows Sam Rockwell playing astronaut Sam Bell as he resides on the moon to send a new power source (called H3) back to Earth to help solve the Earth's energy crisis. He spends his time watching recorded videos that his wife and daughter send him, and he begins to fall into madness as he starts to hallucinate. When he goes out to fix a broken mining machine, he has a hallucination and crashes the rover. When he wakes up in the infirmary, and his robot pal GERTY (Kevin Spacey) tells him that he suffers from memory loss, Sam begins to grow wary of his mission and his spacecraft. When Sam makes an unauthorized trip to the area of his crash, he finds something that forces him to question his sanity.

No, it is not the first science fiction movie to explore the compelling concept of "He is alone and going crazy" nor to use a certain overused plot-point that The Prestige handled much better. It is not the first science fiction movie to use overlong silence in an attempt to create tension, and not the first science fiction movie to feature an A-list actor as a creepy emotionless cyborg.

Given all these facts, I find it hard to call this film "original" exactly.

The idea was a solid one, and one that may have remained interesting if made into a thirty minute short. It was stretched and mutated into a long and boring creature that would occaisionally show some flare of significance, but would immediately fall asleep afterwards. Indeed, there were some moments that were very interesting, but they were never fully explored, and although the ending can be considered by some to be incredible and heart-breaking, it dulls the impact when it became increasingly obvious halfway through what was going to happen.

Sam Rockwell himself did an adequate job in this film, but any Oscar-talk you may hear surrounding his performance in Moon is absolute garbage. He didn't do a terrible job, but the script (which was written during the writers strike) offered absolutely nothing for him, and although he did his best with some of the laughably serious lines, the result ended up sounding terrible and unnatural. He gave several moments of very good acting, but these were all during parts when he was reacting to the circumstances around him instead of when he was saying his God-awful lines.

Another factor that constantly brought me out of the movie was the obvious minature model of the Moon that was used at least every ten minutes for static shots of the landscape and for the scenes where Sam must go out to fix equipment. It was ridiculously unreal, and cast a corny "this is a movie" vibe over the whole project. A sequence where a land rover is moving over the surface of the moon was meant to be breathtaking, but I found myself examining the rover for an "on-off" switch.

Sam's robot companion GERTY proved to be one of the most interesting parts of the film. When a monotone robot that wants to help the main character survive becomes the most entertaining part of the film is when you know that your film may be in trouble.

I often found myself glancing at my watch, and wondering if it would be rude to use my phone to look up the running time of the film. Again, the idea was very interesting, but if you present the same idea for a little over an hour and a half without delving into the subject further, while cutting away to a cheesy model of the surface of the moon every five to ten minutes, you will lose some people. There were entire sequences when they would use, frame for frame, the exact same footage that they used earlier in the movie to make a point, and to try to make you understand it. It soon became repetitive, boring, and unimpressive. I understood what the idea was, and their repeated attempts to "help me understand" only annoyed me.

So, for the record, Moon was a brave attempt to create a tension-filled, emotional, helpless journey into the psyche of a man stationed on the lonely moon. It had some fantastic moments, but more than half of it is repetitive, uninteresting, and just plain boring. If you have the opportunity to watch it for free, do so, as it may wind up being a cult film in the near future.

C-

If you enjoyed Solaris, There Will Be Blood, or Cast Away you might like this movie.