Moon - (By Timothy Johnston - http://timothyawjohnston.blogspot.com/ )

Moon

Seen at: Odeon Panton, London 03/10/2009

To be fair, I was prone to like this movie from the start:
An unknown director, a (fairly) fameless lead actor, a soundtrack composed by Clint Mansell and, finally, a budget, which at $5 Mio. is low for a Hollywood movie.
In a nutshell: Sometime in the future (it is never mentioned when exactly) we earthlings have finally figured out how to provide ourselves with sustainable energy: by harvesting helium-3 from lunar soil and sending it back to earth.
Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) works on the only refinery up there all by himself on a three-year contract. His only companion is a robot called GERTY (voice of Kevin Spacey), essentially a metal box with a display of a smiley face on it. He has two weeks left, when he starts seeing things and the plot pans out...

First off, Sam Rockwell is absolutely phenomenal.
And he must be, since this film is 100 minutes long and he is the only actor, apart from a few people in transmitted video messages. I do not want to give anything away, but it won't do any harm to disclose that at some point in the movie he plays a very dominant character, then a submissive one and finally something in between. Sam Rockwell is the pillar of this movie and I believe that he will be associated with this role in much the same way as we think of Lester Burnham from American Beauty as soon as we hear GERTY the robot talk. Speaking of which, Spacey does alright as far as you can judge a speaking role - but perhaps a less prominent voice would have been more effective. Hearing the robot talking, I was constantly waiting for Spacey to suddenly turn up and walk onto the scene. Although I understand that the name Spacey looks good on a movie poster, this is the one thing I hold against Moon.

Does the film have a deeper meaning? That depends on whether you allow it to. The theme of moral boundaries to the use of technology is definitely discernible, but never in a pretentious way. Also, the concept of a robot behaving in a human (thus fallible) fashion and humans assuming the roles of machines is developed. Again, no fingers are pointed, but it is there for you to find if you want to find it. By giving GERTY such a simple design (the scope of his moods reaches from ;( to :) the director makes fun of the way in which people - for lack of eloquence - overuse smileys in modern communcation tools, but again, in a non-condescending way.

If I didn't know better, I could swear that Moonwas directed by Darren Aronofsky: it has the suspected conspiracy and paranoia of Pi, the loner spirit ofThe Wrestler,mixed with the hallucinations of Requiem for a Dreamand, finally, the artful cinematography of The Fountain. And obviously, when the film opens to the atmospheric tunes of Clint Mansell, associations with Aronofsky's work are inevidable.

If you enjoyed the films mentioned above and don't mind toggling your brain to Sci Fi for a good one and a half hours, you will love this film as much as I did. It is the type of mind-boggling film where you could be turning to the person next to you asking: "Does any of this make sense?"

But you don't.