IF YOU BELIEVE THEY'VE GOT A MAN ON THE "MOON"

Now I wonder if you remember Moon… Director Duncan Jones ( a.k.a. Zowie Bowie son of David Bowie. But we will gloss over that as Mr. Jones chose to change his name... ^_^) won a BAFTA for “Outstanding Debut for Director” in 2009. I started watching it with no massive expectations (other than passing the time before I went out on a Saturday night). Now, I am a full-blown Duncan Jones fan. And I cannot wait to see more of his work.
The year is somewhere far in the future. The place is the Moon. Mankind has found a new way of developing energy – harvesting solar energy straight from the rocks on the Moon. Working this energy plant is no walk in the park, you just ask astronaut Sam Powell (Sam Rockwell). At the end of a three year stint on his own with no company except the robotic assistant GERTY (to whom Kevin Spacey lends his voice) he is very excited to be going home to his family in two weeks time… Sam is completely cut off from Earth due to a long-running communication problem, but he does receive recorded messages from time to time and that helps him hang on. All is running mind-numbingly smoothly, until he has an accident one day while tending to the various generators on the ship. He is rescued by GERTY and resuscitated but finds things on board ship rather different… Sam has no recollection at all of the accident… And GERTY seems… Well, elusive. And he is now forbidden from leaving the center, a rescue team has been sent from earth to tend to his damaged vehicle… Sam smells a rat, outwits GERTY and finds his way back to the crash site to investigate. There he… Oh how can I say this without spoiling the film for you? Ok, there he finds something that changes him and his entire outlook on his situation drastically and forever…
I feel that Moon may well be one of those films that are talked about as “visionary” in the future. And we have to pay our respects to Sam Rockwell, effectively a one-man-band throughout the film, but please don’t let that worry you; the film is not “existential” or “meditative”. Not in the sense you imagine it to be anyway. Duncan Jones manages to make the sterile and “civilized” atmosphere of the space station positively hostile and claustrophobic. And among other things, GERTY deserves attention in his own right, he is not the sort of robot we are used to, he actually “thinks” for himself, seems for all the world to be imbued with feelings and even ends up conspiring with Sam. But again, this is elegantly done and also logical, seeing as GERTY is actually programmed to help and protect Sam… Robots and ethics of robots for example is a topic people are already discussing – a friend of mine is actually writing a thesis on the matter. This is one of the reasons the film is visionary – the subject matter is now still the realm of “sci-fi” but close enough to current technological developments to make you think “what if” . And believe me, although the film is tagged as “sci-fi” in a lot of places they are all very realistic “what if”s… Watch it. But be prepared. It is not what you are expecting…