Moon (film): a pretty decent film very few people saw
I am a big fan of Sam Rockwell. I believe he is one of the most underrated actors of his generation despite the fact that he already is generally regarded as being a great actor. That being said, this movie was pretty good, but not fantastic.
For those of you that haven't run away because you've gotten tired of my incessant chatter, you might already be aware that I am extremely impressed by anyone that can pull off acting on their own for long portions of a film. This was deserving of accolades for Tom Hanks in Castaway, and James Franco in 127 hours. It is also deserving of praise for Sam Rockwell in "Moon" as he spends the entire film acting alone. Even when he is interacting with his robot pal GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) his isn't really acting with Spacey.
loved the emoticons on this thing, it reminded me of a particular robot from a famous video game
So the plot goes like this: Sam Bell (Rockwell) is the only human operator at a near-fully-automated facility on the moon that gathers a new type of energy called helium-3. Sam is on a 3-year contract, and is very much looking forward to going home at the end of his tenure. However, towards the end of his time on the moon he starts to experience rapidly diminishing health, including hallucinations that seriously impact his ability to work.
I don't want to spoil the film for anyone out there because I would say this movie is a "maybe" on the list of people out there that want to watch something new. The film moves at a pretty slow pace and that is annoying, but the sci-fi aspects of it are pretty original and I would say definitely see this if you are a fan of the genre.
The film won a bunch of minor awards but was not considered for the major ones such as the Oscars. It also didn't make very much money and was considered a bit of a flop. However, i feel the effects in the film are pretty remarkable when you consider the entire budget was only $5 million. I can't rate it much higher than this because the plot "twist" becomes quite obvious early on and the movie moves pretty slow.
I see an idea in Moon, but I don't see a motion picture. This character driven sci-fi/drama which explores being human feels too cold, bland and overlong to work. It takes a while to make its point, and relies on our identification with a character who is portrayed with confused acting. The last time Sam Rockwell was in space was in Galaxy Quest. There he was a scream, here he is a yawn. Moon (I suppose) works in small chunks but the big picture feels dull and not very enriching.
Sam Bell, for three years, has been running an energy station on the moon. The energy harvested there supplies an environmentally friendly Earth in the near future. Sam's only companion is the station's computer, Gerty (a more mobile version of HAL 9000, with a smiley face). One day/night, Sam is investigating a wrecked harvesting machine, and inside he discovers a body.... another Sam. What does this mean? Is Sam #1 going crazy from being on the moon for too long? Is Sam #2 a clone? Is Sam #1 a clone? Are there any more bodies out there? and whose side is Gerty gonna take?
Moon probably sounded good as a pitch, considering all the questions that come up once you block out the plot. Unfortunately the movie never really comes alive. The ending is the most exiting part, but ten minutes of solidity doesn't necessary warrant a time investment in eighty minutes of ponderous direction. Moon is tricky to recommend.
I think Moon is a slow film, but that doesn't make it a bad movie. I believe that contributes to transmitting to the spectator the situation that the protagonist is experiencing.
And I think comparing this Sam Rockwell to the one in Galaxy Quest is like comparing it with a meme.
The film is formless. In an unusually good sense for this word. Usually the genre of the picture is determined from the first minutes, but this is a completely different, unexpected case. Science fiction? Certainly. But there are fifteen minutes of mysticism here, at the very beginning. There is also a detective here, with the disclosure of a terrible secret in the middle (and this is very surprising, because the riddle that the protagonist is actually a clone is usually held for the denouement), and a bit of a comedy, because it's very funny to watch a person playing Table tennis with his own, do not know how to play a copy. When we see two clones on the screen that obviously should not have met, and we learn that a rescue team is flying to the Moon, and in fact, a squad of cleanups, it seems that the whole film can eventually turn into a thriller. And, of course, there is a drama in this picture, because it's terribly sad when a person learns that his whole life is a lie, an evil joke, only a way to save on training.
A great start for the young, but certainly talented director Duncan Jones. A similar film could be released twenty years ago and easily merged into the fiction series of those times. But even now, the angular interior of rooms, archaic robot Gerti, frank minimalism in computer technology and painted white and glued to the suit with a flashlight Petzl (such sold in any tourist store), do not stare. Moreover, all this looks very harmonious, the stylistics and design are worked out in the smallest detail: it is stained with dirty fingers, where it must be stained, dusty where it should be dusty. It feels like someone from the extras has really lived in these scenery for at least three years.
However, it is difficult to determine what eventually the director wanted to say. There are many ideas, and for each of them you can make a film. For example, the idea that a mega-corporation can clone people and use clones for their own purposes, then throw it away like a waste material, or that a robot can also become a friend, or maybe the idea of a movie is that each life is valuable, and perhaps the film is just about loneliness and love.
it never made sense to me that there would be table tennis at a facility that was always meant to have only 1 staff member. :)
I liked the pacing; I thought it gave a reasonably good sense of the actual amount of waiting that would probably accompany that job. The plot, though, was fine but just so incredibly novel-from-1976, and like you say, predictable.
Not that it was ever going to be Sam Rockwell's best science fiction movie, anyway.
oh yeah, I remember watched that movie, pretty boring in my opinion. I prefer the movie "the martian".😁
i agree with you
I really enjoyed the movie and it made me a huge fan of Sam Rockwell, he was brilliant in this movie! The twist really had me in 6s and 7s its been a while since a movie did that to me!
i too love Sam... i am happy you enjoyed his performance as well :)
Moon is a movie about a future where the majority of humans power comes from harvesting the rocks on the moon and tells the story of Sam Bell who has almost through with his work contract over there. The acting is probably the best and most distinct part of this movie. Sam Rockwell is basically the only cast in the entire hour and forty minutes and depicts multiple sides to this Sam Bell.
Its not revolutionary movie. it's pretty much a classic space station. It has several gorgeous shots of the moon though, the monochrome grey and long shadows very effectively created a sense of cold and isolation.
The pacing was off. There was no real suspense leading up to the turning point and the way they dealt with the aftermath was predictable and boring.
Granted, new ideas are difficult to come by, so there's nothing wrong with re-using some old one - only it's got to be done better. Moon has taken so much from other films but just hasn't added anything new or different or interesting.
Moon is a good film to watch and even a much better movie if you have nothing to compare it to.
I know something about Rockwell life. I want to tell about his life
After high school, Rockwell moved to New York to train as an actor and pursue an acting The Search for One-eye Jimmy (1994), Glory Daze (1995), co-starring a young Ben Affleck, Mercy (1995), Basquiat (1996), Lawn Dogs (1997) and Box of Moon Light (1996), co-starring John Turturro.‘The Green Mile,’ ‘Galaxy Quest,’ ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind’ By the late ’90s, Rockwell was turning up in supporting roles in bigger movies, including The Green Mile (1999), Galaxy Quest (1999), Charlie’s Angels (2000) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005).
one of Barris’ memoirs and directed by George Clooney.Moon (also 2009), a man wrongfully convicted of murder in Conviction (2010), starring Hilary Swank, a small-time criminal whose specialty is kidnaping dogs for ransom in Seven Psychopaths (2012) and nebbish pharmacist in Better Living Through Chemistry (2014).
He is said to work on every part he accepts with a long-time acting coach. “I gotta get familiar with the material: repetition, rehearsal, and keep reading the material over and over again,” he says about his preparation process.
It’s a lesson he tries to impart when he speaks to acting students.’ and I always sort of say, ‘I don’t really know much about networking.
Moon opens with an advertorial that informs us that the moon has been identified as a huge source of energy for Earth, and that "friendly" big corporations are doing their best to provide us with reliable pure energy.
It seems one of these energy production centres on the far side of the moon is staffed by a lone maintenance guy named Sam Bell, who is at the tail end of a three year contract. His only companionship is a computer called Gerty who is sorta like the mechanical arms from Iron Man, only he has Kevin Spacey's voice.
As Sam is all by his lonesome, he fills his time with hobbies, exercising, TV, tending to his garden and waiting for dispatches from employers and his family on Earth, which are delayed as the far side of the moon gets no live signals due to inaccessibility. His only action is when one of the many "harvesting" machines is experiencing malfunctions or needs maintenance.
On one of these call outs things don't go according to plan, and Sam wakes up afterwards in an infirmary
Yeah it's a shame it flopped, it's not a perfect movie by any means but the twist did surprise me and I enjoyed watching it. (totally forgot it was Kevin Spacey as the voice, man its hard to to think of that guy the same way ever since the recent fallout)
" It also didn't make very much money"
Followed all the low budget rules, except one: they forgot to make a horror film.
"the plot "twist" becomes quite obvious early on and the movie moves pretty slow"
That is very true, and the movie also made the decision not to reveal the plot twist in trailers and blurbs, which is rare, as the "plot twist" could fairly be said to occur at the end of Act 1: the set-up. Still, I don't think revealing the whole premise in trailers would have helped, as audiences would have realized anyway that this is a cerebral think-movie, not a balls out thriller.
Personally, I love this movie. It takes echoes of other movies I love, like "2001" (Kevin Spacey is this movie's "Hal") and "Silent Running" (Sam Rockwell is this movie's lonely Bruce Dern), combines them with another standard sci-fi premise, and reinvents itself as a thoroughly effective think piece. The key to the success of the movie is the bond it builds between audiences and characters, before revealing critical information about those characters.
The fact that the director, Duncan Jones, who also came up with the story, was David Bowie's son resonates. There are elements in this movie, such as the degree to which the Kevin Spacey AI successfully replicates human traits, which must resonate strongly with him, himself forever wondering whether he replicates the traits of one of the most original and iconic men who ever lived. What is the essence of humanity and individuality?
Sam Rockwell is low key terrific in this, just as Dern was in "Silent Running." It is his unflashy modesty that universalizes the story, a story not of one exceptional individual, but of all of us. :)