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Seattle International Film Festival movie review: 'Moon'
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Moon/2009 - Directed by: Duncan Jones
Starring: Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey
The Plot: Just shy of a three year solo tour harvesting helium 3 on Earth's Moon, Sam Bell, (Sam Rockwell) finally discovers himself. Literally. Near death and just as confused about the possibility of inoperable multiple personality disorder the two Sams look to uncover whether this is another case of full-moon madness or something far more disturbing...
The Good: Sam Rockwell and Sam Rockwell. It's not going to be easy tackling this film without blowing its "secret" right out into the open. If I spoil the thing the review will be a lengthy, rambling affair. If I don't - I figure I could save myself a few hours.
What Moon does right is cast Sam Rockwell as the lead in a film with no other actors. Sam's our sole source of humanity in this movie - he's literally cast into an acting void. If we're going to kick it with an individual actor for 100 minutes I can think of nobody who could make that time run a bit more breezy and fun than Rockwell can. There are more than a few "human" moments in Moon, and under the influence of Sam Rockwell they do inject a generous, if not much needed, dose of sympathy for his character and his condition.
That Sam is also assigned to play two separate versions of himself, interacting with each other, takes the triple threat of the Michael J. Fox family sit down in Back to the Future II look like a cheap parlor trick by comparison.
Speaking of cheap parlor tricks....
The Bad: I said I wasn't going to reveal this film's primary spoiler. The epic letdown of the flick is that it's not any real mystery as to what's going on behind the scenes. It's the first thing you'll think of when "Secret" Sam makes his first appearance fifteen minutes into the movie. That Duncan Jones (Heir Director) can't figure out a way to make the next 80 minutes nothing more than a series of "shocking" discoveries that we all pretty much knew were waiting for us turns the film into something of a tedious beast. That feeling you get when you think you know what a movie might be about, and you're proved right, but there's still a whole hell of a lot of movie left, so you're hoping that this was just the set-up for much more clever twistiness to come...
Keep hoping brothers and sisters, this film and this screenplay run out of ammunition in Act 1. The charming smart-asses in the film reviewing industry might find this a "relief", "visionary" or even "bold" but for the rest of us, the people that actually fund this business - it won't be. It'll be boring and predictable, and that's never a winning combination.
The Ugly: And it all started with a ping pong table...
So this film is about one man doing a three year solo stint on the moon with only a computer as his companion. (ahhhhh Kevin Spacey - you were born to voice HAL sometime in your career...) So why's there a frakking ping pong table in the base? It has some relevance in a later scene but that just makes the set design as well as the plot that much more fabricated. And that's pretty much the lethal blow to Moon as a film. It's like the "cool" idea of the story wasn't going to allow anything close to reason or logic enter the film context. The ping pong table is there, even though it would take up ass-loads of limited space, and be a major burden to transport, not to mention remain totally unused by the single occupant of the mining operation, because we need a scene where a guy plays himself ping pong. Once you spot this oversight in logic for the sake of film, the rest of Moon's major discretions against reality will come pouring in like a pipe main burst on screen - by the end you'll be drowning in them.
Sci-fi plots are genetically disposed to be riddled with holes. Moon has holes within holes. We have super-computers in this unknown future - Kevin Spacey's Gerty, (still wondering why this thing's called Gerty) is the chief example of this technology. He's smart, he can repair wounded workers, can cook meals, clean house, be a chess companion, (nope - sadly he can't play ping pong) he can even carry on private conversations with the company sponsoring the helium 3 project on the moon... So why doesn't he just run the operation? Why do we need a human being to spend three years alone on the moon when it's radically apparent that a computer could do this work? Gerty's the brains, Sam's the hands. I can't believe that any functioning business would invest in this moon mining project, as presented here, and that would be the fiscally sound way to run this thing. You'll definitely need to see this film to know what that last statement means. I hate to even bring it up not being able to finish the thought - but it's another blazing oversight by the writers/filmmaker in a film absolutely brimming with blazing oversights.
Tragically Moon sets itself up to be something it could never be: Smart and consistent.
The Verdict: Moon is very much like the Nigerian Royalty Internet Scam. It's going to ask a lot of you, and the pay-off will be nominal at best. Save yourself some cash and energy - ignore it.
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