Had the pleasure of seeing Duncan Jones’s excellent sci-fi think-piece last weekend. What could have been 90-plus minutes of futuristic weirdness, Moon instead is a beautifully heroic and surprisingly human film. Sam Rockwell reaches for a performance worthy of at least and Oscar nod, if not the statue.
Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a lonely technician on a lunar mining outpost, two weeks away from the end of his solitary three-year tour, with only Gerty (think of a kinder, gentler HAL-9000) as his companion. Finally the stress and isolation start to get to Sam—cue the hallucinations.
While inspecting some kind of mobile rock harvester he gets into an accident and wakes up dazed and confused in the base’s medical bay. But he’s obsessed with finding out what happened out there. And when he returns to the scene of the wreck he discovers something that forces him to question his individuality and his existence.
Revealing any more would be a ruinous spoiler. Go see it for yourself.
[…] I saw it, the first thing I thought of was how Oscar worthy his performance was. Rockwell has to shoulder a huge burden as the film’s sole human (apart […]
By: Shooting for the Moon « A Pale Light on October 24, 2009
at 11:02 am