"This is ground control to Major Tom..."
I went to see “Moon” on Tuesday evening with my brother at AMC and wanted to give a few impressions.
First, it is a good movie. It’s not exactly high-brow science-fiction like “The Man From Earth”, but nor is it a monument to stupidity like “Next” (I’m not saying “Next” was bad… it had one particularily inventive sequence, just that it was pretty dumb).
When the trailer first came out for the movie, I told my brother “ok, so this movie looks worth seeing, but I’ll bet you I can nail down exactly what happens from beginning to end just from that trailer.”
I was right on all plot points. But the “twists” aren’t the reason to see this movie, it’s the job that Sam Rockwell does as this isolated babysitter of a station on the far side of the moon.
Brief outline without spoilers; Sam Rockwell is a contractor for a company that mines “H3″ from the far side of the moon to provide energy for the Earth. “H3″ apparently saved us all from the energy crisis and we no longer rely on Earth-based fuel sources. He’s on a three year contract to look after this mining station all by himself (I found it kind of odd that one dude was entrusted to watch over the station giving the Earth 90% of its energy, but whatever). With two weeks left on his contract, there’s an accident with one of the mining drones and upon checking it out, there’s an accident.
I won’t go any further than that.
Watching Sam interact with his robot nanny (voiced by Kevin Spacey) is interesting and I really enjoyed that aspect. Sam Rockwell just does a great job all around with this. It’s very hard to write much about his performance without spoiling things.
Wow, this has turned into a really crappy review because I can’t say anything without spoiling it…
Atmosphere is great; very good at evoking the isolation of the situation. The minimal music score is put to excellent use. The set design is very reminiscent of “Alien” giving hte habitat a very “lived in” feel.
So overall, I recommend seeing “Moon”. I would also recommend seeing it in a theater as lower-budget indy films like this need to be encouraged so we see more of them.
That is all.
