Lower Decks

I’d read a few reviews of ‘Moon’ before I finally got a chance to see it, and none of them were written specifically for the genre audience. I’ve never seen ‘2001,’ so of course when it was inevitably referenced, all I had were the sequence of books to draw from, and not the famous film itself, so that won’t be my focus in this review, and you’re going to get a different perspective on what it means when you hear that for most of the movie, Sam Rockwell talks to himself, because that will be my focus, specifically what the means of that dialogue means for the genre audience.

‘Moon’ is described as hard science fiction, which is to say not so much the kind operatic drama embodied by something like Star Wars or the new ‘Star Trek,’ but a movie that spends its story on the mechanics of a life that is removed from our specific experience. Based in the future, it’s got its own rules to live by, and it’s those rules on which ‘Moon’ concentrates.

The premise is that Rockwell is a technician on, well, the moon, overseeing technology that’s mining the new and efficient substance that’s allowing humans back on Earth to live at a better standard of living than ever before. He’s all alone up there, besides Gerty, voiced by Kevin Spacey, an inelegantly designed robot that mechanically though pleasantly assists and interacts with Rockwell during a supposed three-year assignment that keeps him from a new family he can’t communicate live with back home, because there are some repairs he can’t make.

Or, well, so he’s told. There’s more than meets the eye. There always is. So when I report that Sam Rockwell ends up talking with himself, there’s a very specific explanation you probably haven’t heard yet, and that’s cloning. From ‘Blade Runner’ to ‘Star Trek Nemesis’ (even the ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ episode “Whispers”), sci-fi fans have long become familiar with the concept of human cloning or replication, but this has got to be the most sustained and substantial example of the implications inherent in the idea that there’s been, and it’s because Rockwell’s character, Sam Bell, becomes so wrapped up in the discovery of it that the audience learns about them right alongside him. Like Neo’s initial experiences in ‘The Matrix’ or an M. Night Shyamalan film, there’s a dawning horror, but so much humanity in Rockwell’s performance you find yourself forgetting that you’ve ever seen Sam Rockwell in a film before, that anyone could have failed to understand what he has always promised to deliver on film: a deeply human alienation. Except this time, instead of being comic or grotesque, he’s finally allowed to strip away all the layers, which is sort of symbolically suggested early on, when he shaves away shaggy hair and a beard that have been obscuring his face as Bell reaches the final weeks of incredible isolation (or so he believes).

‘Moon’ is exactly the kind of film that would be a sensation if it had any kind of substantial release, or adequate coverage, but as much as critics love it, it will never be more than a cult hit, something that could perhaps one day inspire perhaps an even greater achievement to wider acclaim, but will have to be happy with its own achievement on a small scale. Even the minor fame of its director, Duncan Jones, always identified as the son of David Bowie in those reviews, stands to gain in a later career from this great film, but not for this film.

There’s no pretension, here, however, and that’s the deal winner and the deal breaker. There’s nothing flashy about it, just an underrated star giving his best performance, in a story that never flinches away from itself. How rare indeed. It feels familiar and completely new at the same time, but unforgettable. The moral implications feel like ‘The Truman Show,’ but the victory like ‘Forrest Gump,’ hard fought but softly won. Bell concocts a scheme, once he realizes that in one form or another he is going to be stuck on that outpost, to eek out an eventual vindication, and it’s the sort of ending that you wish you could follow up on, but know that it’s all too appropriate that you never will, because you won’t have to.

Far more than this summer’s ‘The Fall,’ ‘Moon’ is better even than that. It’s a transcending experience in every way.