Moon (4/5 Stars) June 24, 2009

If you met your clone, would you get along with yourself? 


That’s a question Sam Bell, the astronaut, is forced to realize the answer to; and he didn’t even know he had a clone. Moon follows in the footsteps of such landmark science fiction movies such as Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s like 2001 because the set design so obviously draws from the look of the that movie down to the video-phone and the HAL-like robot named Gertie, voiced by Kevin Spacey, that assists Sam. It’s like Alien because the movies plot centers around the expose of an evil corporate plot that is as inhuman and coldly calculated as the suggestion by Mother, the corporate motherboard in Alien, that the crew was expendable.
Sam Bell at one point signed a contract for a three year stint on the far side of the moon, manning a station that provides a great deal of the energy on Earth (Futuristic energy from moon rocks, what will they think of next!). Why three years? Well, it seems that the human body can’t take much more stress than that in a low-gravity environment before it starts to fall apart. It apparently wouldn’t be cost effective to transport the astronauts to and from Earth to the far side of the moon. So the corporation cloned Sam Bell and every three years a new Sam Bell replaces the old one, (who is disposed of in a very nefarious way.) What makes this so evil is that the corporation never tells Sam Bell about it. Sam thinks he has a three-year, at the end of which he will go home to his wife and kids. When we first meet Sam, he thinks he has about two weeks. The isolation has wracked his senses and he is starting to hallucinate. He gets into an accident outside of the station, is knocked out, and is presumed dead. Inside the station a clone is prematurely awakened, learns of the accident, goes out to investigate, and ends up rescuing himself. Now the two men are face-to-face and they start to realize their entire consciousness is a lie.
Sam Rockwell, an exceedingly talented but still largely unknown actor, plays both Sam Bell and Sam Bell beautifully. He never puts on a show or gives the trick away. He creates two distinct characters who the exact same people. You can and can’t tell them apart at the same time. Sam makes a good tag team with himself. When you see Eddie Murphy playing several characters in a movie you can always sort of tell how they did it. Eddie is dressed as a fat dude in one camera shot, the camera moves and Eddie is dressed as an old grandma. Its somewhat obvious how they do it. Here, Sam is in so many wide shots with himself that it was very to tell exactly how they were editing himself together with himself. About half way through I decided not to care anymore and just started thinking of Sam Rockwell as two entirely separate people. There is an especially impressive scene where they manage to have the Sams play ping-pong together in a wide shot. I know that there were special effects going all the time in this movie but they aren’t played as if the makers are expecting us to be wowed by special effects. They instead focus on the story, which is where the focus should be. As Michael Bay is now proving with Transformers, a movie comprised only of special effects will not pass for a movie anymore (I actually write this a few days before Transformers opens. I hope hope hope audiences will prove me right.)
The first time director of this movie is Duncan Jones. He deserves to not have it mentioned that David Bowie is his father. (I mention it anyway because one of my favorite Bowie songs is “Space Oddity” and hey, like father, like son.)
Kevin Spacey humbly provides the voice of Gertie. They couldn’t have picked a better actor. Somehow he can make it seem like the monotone robot is thinking. I especially liked how Gertie isn’t a jerk robot like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There aren’t very many bad people in this movie besides the distant corporation that is mostly unseen. What we witness is teamwork between clones and a robot on the inhospitable far side of the moon. I won’t tell you what they come up with or what happens. That’s the best part of the movie.