Perhaps The Moon Is Livelier Than I Thought

I watched Moon yesterday. While goofing around on Amazon a couple of days earlier, I noticed one of the labels someone had applied to the movie, and though it meant nothing in the moment, once Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell*) wakes up in the infirmary after his accident with the Harvester, I immediately knew what the label was talking about (I'm going to try my best not to spoil it for you, if you haven't seen Moon, which is a movie I'd highly recommend).

What's nice about Moon is I don't believe knowing the reveal ahead of time spoiled the movie for me. Director Duncan Jones has the reveal in the first third of the movie, so it isn't as though the film is built around it. Most of the movie is about the employees in the lunar station coming to grips with the reveal. It's not easy for any of them, and we see denial, anger, acceptance, but in different ways, and at different times. So you have one character ignoring the ramifications of it all, and trying, first to be friendly, then later simply throwing himself into a model he's working on, while another starts with ignoring, then moves to tearing the station apart looking for a secret room. The whole thing might be hardest on Gerty**, the computer assistant responsible for looking after the employees and the station.

Gerty (I'm not aware of it representing any cool acronym) is supposed to represent the company's interests, but this also includes looking after those who man the station. The answers Sam wants, the things the people on the station want to do after the reveal, are in conflict with the company's interests. What's Gerty to do? We see Gerty try to deflect queries, and try to care for Sam in other ways (like making sure he's well-fed), but I don't know if Gerty ever really doubted who it would side with. There's a scene before the reveal (it actually leads directly to the reveal) where Sam appears to have tricked Gerty, but I wonder if Gerty wasn't simply playing along, since it would help Sam, and Gerty would have plausible deniability.

There are some touching moments in the film, and the early parts, depicting Sam trying to cope with the isolation he was feeling, are well done. The shots of the interior of the station make it look so quiet and sterile, I could see how it would place a strain on Sam, especially when he might never know when he'd round a corner and one of Gerty's assist arms would pop up. Like having a coworker everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Freaky.

Sam's hallucinations early on did confuse me. Between them, and the weird skip during a transmission from his wife, I thought the movie would be about Sam thinking there were people he didn't know about, hiding in the station, possibly out to harm him, but maybe he's just losing his mind, or perhaps they're ghosts. Might make a decent horror flick***, but the route they went was more interesting. Still, I'm not sure what the hallucinations were meant to represent. I believe the transmission glitch was just a sign the system the company had in place was breaking down after too many years, and maybe the hallucinations were a similar sign of things falling apart with Sam after so long. Anyway, highly recommended.

* So Rockwell was Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2, which I guess I'll be waiting to see on DVD at this point. When I saw him in trailers, I thought it was Edward Norton, which confused me, because you can't have Edward Norton playing the Hulk and some industrialist foe of Tony Stark's. That's just going to muddle things. For whatever reason, Rockwell's face reminds me a lot of Edward Norton's, which continued in this movie, having slicked back, Bruce Wayne style hair. Also Rockwell's eyebrows, of all thing, reminded me of Christian Bale's.

** Kevin Spacey, doing what seemed to be a pretty solid version of HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

*** It feels like I'm describing a more grounded version of Event Horizon or Pandorum.