thomas4cinema

I pushed watching that film ahead of me for a long time, suspecting it to be very good, but also a tad boring. It is a tad boring, but very good. It has clear references in film history, “Silent Running” most obviously, which is not a bad thing, as these older films have already established the loneliness of the long distance space traveler, or rather long-time moon squatter, and “Moon”does not take a long time to establish this situation moon digging supervisor Sam Bell is in. There seems to be almost something like a genre of “alone and pretty depressed in space”, and I warmly remember my first encounter with “Dark Star”, which I so much must watch again. Anyway: some of the expected turns of events turn into less expected turns, and this is where the film has its strengths. It is very well written, and makes the situation of Sam Rockwell’s character plausible despite terribly implausible things happening. He has to face this implausibility, and he does, and he accepts, and takes action. And when I say “he”, I do not really mean that, but that is exactly the point. The general premise of the film should not even be mentioned, because it is great, I am sure, to go in there not knowing anything and then trying to cope with the developments that shatter the foundations of the astronaut’s life. An excellent film debut by Duncan Jones, with tiny flaws, and after already having seen “Source Code”, it seems he sticks to his ambitious approach of not deciding on which side of the blockbuster-arthouse divide he sees himself. I’d rather he would move his next project back toward the smaller and more intimate “Moon” side, which is the more interesting of the two.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10009075-moon/