Duncan Jones, “Moon” (2009)
Like father, like son, no? … decades ago David Bowie sang songs of doomed astronaut Major Tom and in 2009 son Duncan Jones announces his arrival as a film director by making a movie about another doomed astronaut. Anything else that the film “Moon” might have in common with Dad’s songs and career? The film also turns on themes of personal isolation, paranoia, the fragility of identity and its dependence on memory, an individual’s link with humanity and how all these issues can be manipulated by a cynical corporate culture. On their own, these problems are quite weighty to deal with in a single film, let alone a debut film with a conventional plot and a fairly simple one at that. It’s no surprise then that “Moon” sometimes falters under the burden of its themes which more or less parallel aspects of David Bowie’s career as it progressed over nearly 50 years from 1967 to his death in early 2016 and its concerns with alienation and isolation, identity crises and transformations, and compromises with the commercial music industry, often to Bowie’s detriment as an artist.
The plot revolves around one character, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), the sole worker on a mining base, Sarang Station, operated by an energy company called Lunar Industries on the moon. The company’s business is to extract helium-3 from the moon’s surface and bring it to Earth for use as fuel. The entire mining facility can be operated by one person; all that Bell needs to do is oversee the harvesting machines and send the fuel to Earth in canisters. He is coming close to the end of his 3-year contract and looking forward to reunion with his wife and young daughter. A communication problem between Sarang and Lunar Industries means Bell only gets occasional drip feeds of messages from his wife Tess. The only other company Bell has is the facility’s HAL-like computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) who attends to his every need with obsequious diligence.
Sam begins to experience hallucinations and one such hallucination causes him to crash his rover into a harvester. The next thing he knows, he is in an infirmary with no memory of the accident. While recovering, he overhears GERTY ordering a rescue team from Lunar Industries and receiving instructions not to allow him outside the base so he tricks GERTY into allowing him outside by faking an emergency. He retrieves the crashed rover and discovers his likeness lying in the vehicle. Bringing his twin back to base and helping to revive him, Sam now has to contend with which one of them is real and which is the clone, and what Lunar Industries has intended for both of them. GERTY is forced to admit that they are both clones, so the two Sams search the base and discover beneath the base that there is an underground facility stocked with hundreds of hibernating Sam clones.
Initially the film is a bit slow, so as to immerse viewers into the space environment and empathise with Sam’s isolation and its psychological effects (the hallucinations, the strange dreams), and the pace quickens after he discovers his clone in the rover. From this point on, the plot moves more briskly and many initial assumptions that viewers might have made about Sam are turned on their heads: the hallucinations he suffers are not due to his extreme social isolation but to the deterioration and shutdown of his circuits. Viewers gradually realise that the serious, cynical Sam of the film’s pre-crash first half is not the same serious, cynical Sam in the film’s post-crash second half; that’s right, the first serious Sam becomes the secondary, more jokey character (played by Robin Chalk) who sacrifices himself so that the “main” Sam character can fool the incoming rescue team (who will really serve as executioners for both Sams) and escape to Earth with a message about how Lunar Industries has been manufacturing clones to save on hiring proper astronauts and pocketing the wages that would have been paid.
The acting performances are good and the settings are also good, given that the film was made on a small budget in one studio with very few CGI effects. The actual premise of the film doesn’t quite make sense logically: if a society is advanced enough to create an apparently sharing, caring computer like GERTY, surely it is also advanced enough to make Sarang Station completely automated? Oh yeah, check, it is “completely automated” if one treats the clones as mass produced machines. But why would the clones be made to wear out after three years? Wouldn’t there be more sense in creating a clone that can last several years – unless Lunar Industries execs believe that after three years, a clone might have accumulated enough information and experience (as Sam has) to suspect it is being manipulated by its employer, start rummaging around the base and discover the awful secret about itself and its fellow clones?
If one puts aside the more implausible aspects of the plot – do the Sams really believe that people on Earth will believe their message about Lunar Industries’ unethical hiring practices? – then the film actually serves as a generator of ideas about how we think about the nature of individuality; whether it’s possible to regard clones, robots and other non-biological beings like them as more human than humans themselves if clones and robots become more than what their nature is intended to be, and humans less than what their potential is; and whether such creations are deserving of the same rights and freedoms as humans, that is, the rights and freedoms to be autonomous creatures capable of making decisions, and not to be subjected to exploitation and slavery. In this way the film pays tribute to earlier sci-fi influences like Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Ridley Scott’s “Bladerunner” which dealt with similar themes.
While not completely original, the film’s creativity is expressed more in the way it uses familiar ideas and concepts from other science fiction films and reinterprets them to suggest something new or overturn viewers’ expectations. The result is that “Moon” appears fresh despite riffing on familiar sci-fi movie motifs. Perhaps this is what makes this film unique even though much of it is derivative.
The one downside is the blaaah music soundtrack … couldn’t Jones have swallowed his pride about refusing help from Dad and asked him to create a half-decent soundtrack appropriate for the movie?