Tagline:
The last place you’d ever expect to find yourself

Wide Release Date:
June 12, 2009

Directed by:
Duncan Jones
Written by:
Nathan Parker
Produced by:
Stuart Fenegan, Trudie Styler

Starring:
Sam Rockwell
Kevin Spacey
Dominique McElligott
Kaya Scodelario
Benedict Wong
Matt Berry
Malcolm Stewart

PREGAME THOUGHTS

College was full of kids with awful movie taste. Myself included. I didn’t like movies much anyway and I really didn’t know what was good, but I could tell when someone was into the bad shit. And I wouldn’t listen to them if they were like “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was the best movie of 2006″. I wouldn’t listen to them ever again about literally anything.

But then I had another friend who told me good things about Moon. This is going back 10 years. His favorite movie from the late ’00s was Children of Men, which I liked a lot, and he had good things to say about Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, neither of which I’ve seen but a fan of David Lynch is a fan of mine!

So this Moon movie has had intrigued me for years, and I like Sam Rockwell. He’s in outer space a lot. At long last, here we go.

THE 700(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

The year is I-Don’t-Know. It’s sometime in the future. The ability to mine helium-3 from the moon is necessary to provide Earth with alternative fuel. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole individual stationed in a facility on the far side of the moon. He is in charge of maintaining operations and launching the canisters of helium-3 to Earth. His three-year contract will be up in a two weeks.

Three years is a long-ass time to be alone with Kevin Spacey! He plays GERTY, the facility’s artificial intelligence entity who provides assistance to Sam. Other than that, he gets pre-recorded messages from his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott), who was pregnant before his three-year stint on the moon began.

“Hello, Sam. Don’t worry, I’ll try not to make any inappropriate sexual advances toward you. I can’t make any promises, of course.”

Looking forward to getting the fuck off the moon, Sam Rockwell bides his time and patiently continues his menial work… but then he starts seeing odd hallucinations of a young girl and a beardy man in the facility. He crashes his lunar rover after a distraction out on the moon’s surface, which causes him to lose air and consciousness.

He finds himself awakening on a table in the infirmary. He is instructed by corporate management that he is to stay in the facility while a rescue team makes their way to the moon to fix the rover and the harvester he crashed into. GERTY’s acting all weird too, like something fishy is going on, so Sam sneaks out of the facility to investigate. He makes his way to the location of the incident and discovers an unconscious man inside the crashed rover. He looks just like Sam. Sam brings the unconscious guy who looks like Sam back to the facility. The unconscious guy is most certainly the Sam who crashed, so he will henceforth be referred to as Sam #1. When Sam #1 regains consciousness, Sam #1 thinks he’s losing his mind while Sam #2 is very angry and skeptical about it.

Gives “dancing by yourself” a whole new meaning! HA HA HA!

GERTY spends much time trying to distract Sam #1’s curiosity and questions, but eventually GERTY is cornered into telling Sam #1 that he is a clone. Sam #2 is a clone, too. Both Sams are clones of the original Sam, who had long ago finished his assignment. The new Sams have all of the original Sam’s memories, including those of his family, implanted. And this royally sucks. Everything Sam #1 ever knew has been a lie. Or, at least, with respect to him personally it’s a lie. An argument could be made that it’s NOT a lie!

Revelations slowly become known: all Sam clones get sick at the end of their three-year stint, there’s a secret room full of hundreds of hibernating clones, radios to Earth are deliberately jammed, and all past clones are incinerated after their time is up. This is all crazy shit, and the Sams have trouble handling it. Sam #1 rovers his way out of the jamming radius and attempts to phone home; “his” daughter is now 15, Tess is dead, and the original Sam can be heard off-screen. This fucks Sam #1 up even more, and this is about the time he starts getting sick like every other clone.

It is surmised that the rescue team is not going to take too kindly to the clones realizing they’re clones and will probably kill them, so they formulate a plan: make a Sam #3, place him back in the crashed rover, Sam #2 lives his life in the facility, and Sam #1 gets stowed away in a helium-3 container destined for Earth. Since Sam #1 is all fucked up and sick, he changes the plan: Sam #2 gets stowed away, and Sam #1 will return to the rover to die and be found by the rescue team. GERTY will wake Sam #3 to live his life in the facility. Cool? Excellent.

So they, with GERTY’s permission, do a hard reset on him. He’ll never know what happened. The Sams destroy the radio tower jamming the live feeds, then Sam #2 leaves. Sam #1 dies in the rover. Sam #3 is awakened. The rescue team is fooled. Sam #2, upon arriving on Earth, busts this whole lousy operation wide open to the press. Everyone wins. Except the corporation. And you, because you just read over 700 words.

WOO HOO! WEIRD BEARD IS GOIN’ HOME!

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — Clones and Consciousness

I’ve written at length about my latest existential crisis, which is more on the subject of death and afterlife and less on consciousness. But consciousnesses has been a big part of it, and I’m still thinking a lot about it. Moon is a good movie that touches on the subject, and I especially find the concept of consciousness with respect to cloning a very interesting subject.

We see two clones of the original Sam, both of whom are completely unaware that they are clones. As far as they’re concerned, they have identical memories of their entire fake existence… up until the point where they’re both alive at the same time and experiencing slightly different versions of the immediate present from their own points of view. This implies two different consciousnesses at the same time, seemingly manifesting itself out of nothing, right? Weird stuff. Now, what if GERTY is sentient enough of an artificial intelligence entity to develop consciousness? That’s its own discussion for another movie.

All this stuff is armchair Reddit philosophy. You can look up any thread that hits the subject of consciousness from every angle, but it still doesn’t make me feel any better about the idea. Like death, like afterlife, you will never truly know the whole story about consciousness. That’s frustrating. I like to know things! If I want to learn something, I’m pretty capable of learning it. I hate knowing that I’ll never know something. It’s fucked up.

I try to put myself in either of Sam’s shoes, and I found it immensely disconcerting that all the memories I have might be implanted. This is where you start getting into stoner philosophy and brain-in-a-jar thought exercises, but it’s enough to go down a weird rabbit hole. You can see the pain, though, when everything he knows about his family isn’t actually real to him. It’s real to some other Sam. That sucks, man. I can’t think of anything harder to deal with. Except maybe moving. I hate moving.

They’re like the family he never had!

TOPIC 2 — A Simultaneous Capitalism/Afterlife Allegory

Speaking of afterlife, there’s a theme in Moon that reminds me of the religious idea of life after death. Sam works for three years with the anticipation of going back home. Obviously, he knew what he was getting into when he left for the mission (not knowing that he’s really the fourth or fifth Sam since the whole process started), but I would imagine that it’s like prison. Solitary confinement with little contact to the outside world, a future timestamp on the sentence, and living every day knowing you’re closer to the end. Something about that sounds like moving onto a new life after finishing the old one. In the case of Moon, there is no afterlife. There is just incineration and being replaced.

In comes the capitalism theme. Work hard for years and years, and there’s no real reward. The machine doesn’t care about you as a person, they just care about you as a worker. After three years of being used, you’re dumped and replaced! Think about that the next time you’re at your cubicle plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. After three years they’ll throw you in the furnace, and your job will be given to some douchebag fresh out of college who will be all like “durrrr, I was in Kappa Alpha Theta”. Go fuck yourself, Dylan.

Gives “playing with yourself” a whole new meaning! HA HA HA!

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Kevin Spacey read the script and agreed to voice GERTY, but only when the film was finished and if he liked it. Having loved it, he recorded his lines in half a day.
Oh, the known sex offender was high maintenance? What a surprise. You never really hear a story like “This role was written for Jon Voight, but he hated it so much that he stood on the table and took a big shit on the copy of his script. The role instead went to Carrot Top.”

The film was written for Sam Rockwell, who Duncan Jones wanted to cast in a different film, but Jones and Rockwell could never come to an agreement on which part he should play. Because he wanted to work with Rockwell so much, he created this film for him.
See, like I said. This fucking guy wrote the whole movie with Sam Rockwell in mind. What if he didn’t want to do it? They would need to get a Sam Rockwell-type like Kevin Connolly, and nobody wants that.

The film takes place in 2035.
Wrong. Unrealistic. Global warming is going to murder us all by then.

In order to prepare for the movie, Sam Rockwell watched Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Dead Ringers (1988).
In order to prepare for this movie review, I watched Daddy Day Care (2003) and Porno Hags 2 (1999).

Before making this film, Duncan Jones was more famous for being the son of David Bowie.
Oh snap? So the son of David Bowie elevated himself above his claim-to-fame of “being David Bowie’s son” by making Moon? I highly doubt that. Nobody remembers this movie.

Appeared on Entertainment Weekly’s list of “The 50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen,” in the July 16, 2012 issue.
Yeah, but I’ve seen it. Checkmate.

Aside from those played by Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey, there are no other major characters in the film.
That’s not trivia! They’re on the moon where there are no other people! What are we expecting, a Secret Moon Civilization? No. This movie is called “Moon”, not “Secret Moon Civilization”. Although, you gotta admit, that sounds like a good movie. I suggest a main character to be played by Carrot Top.

My God, it’s full of stars! And so forth.

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Yes. Very thought-provoking, which is my main #1 desire from my media. It made me think thing hard enough to freak me out, so the movie did its job.

If I had watched this movie in college, I probably wouldn’t have tumbled so far into the large swamp that is now my mid-30s crisis. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad, but I DO like to think and feel things! In short, thank you Moon. I look forward to watching movies named after other celestial bodies in the future.