Just like District 9 earlier in the year, Moon, which has shamefully garnered a small release thus far despite overwhelming critical praise, goes beyond the label of science fiction and presents a beautifully acted, superbly crafted story that is so much more than an outer space genre flick.
When we first meet Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), hes two weeks away from finishing his contract with moon miners Lunar Industries and leaving the station on the moon where hes resided for the last three years. As luck would have it, though, Sam gets himself into a minor accident one day while performing routine mining exploration, and when he awakens back at the base, tended by his constant robot companion GERTY (voice of Kevin Spacey), some very strange things begin to cause him to wonder if hell ever see his wife and daughter againor if he has, perhaps, started to lose his mind.
So, first of all, this is Rockwells show all the way, though I gotta say, Spacey may just have been made to play a robots voice (he does more off-screen with only a bulky white computer that expresses itself with happy face emoticons and his voice than a lot of actors do with a whole movie full of screen time). Rockwell plays, basically, a man talking to himself attempting to determine his own level of sanityon top of that, one of the Sams he plays has to be very sick, literally falling apart at the seams. Juries and judging panels love that dual-role stuff, and somebody better hand this man an award once the statue season rolls around. The story itself, though, is the real star, and, as directed by Duncan Jones in his feature film debut, its all at once suspenseful, poignant, haunting, funny, and conversation-inducing. The best sci-fi films are those that, like 2001, present universal themes that dont necessarily have to be set in a space station, and though Moon deals with mining on the moon, cloning, and other decidedly genre topics, the universality of ideas about what it means to be human, the importance we place on perception, and the dangers of technology run rampant give the film its unobtrusive moral compass. At its gooey center, however, the real beauty of Moon lies in Sams very personal, very solitary story, as he struggles to understand his existencea struggle Rockwell plays with brilliant subtlety and Jones directs with a skillful hand that never tells us how to feel, just lets us figure it out right along with Sam.