"Moon" (2009)

Directed by Duncan Jones. Starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey.

I actually hadn't heard anything about Moon until about four hours before I went to go see it, and searching it on Google briefly didn't lend much insight into what it was about. Essentially, I went into Moon thinking it was one of those tales of deep-space isolationism, in which the protagonist is accompanied only by his computer and the vast emptiness of space as he delves into eventual madness (i.e., I thought it was going to be a Space Odyssey rip-off). What it was, however, was a very inventive sci-fi with a touching sense of humanity.

The premise is deceptively simple: in the near future, astronaut Sam Bell (Rockwell) is sent to the moon in order to harvest helium-3, the standard source of fuel on Earth. He spends three years in isolation, alone save for the occasional video he receives from his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and his computer, GERTY (Spacey), a benevolent AI designed solely to ensure Sam's well-being. As he nears the end of his three-year contract, Sam eagerly awaits returning to Earth and the wife and young daughter he left behind. However, after an accident, in which a strange hallucination causes him to crash his lunar rover, Sam makes a startling and bizarre discovery that causes him to doubt his own sanity and the reality of his existence.

The film's exposition does indeed raise the possibility that Moon could be yet another "man goes stir-crazy after being alone" film, as I initially suspected, but very quickly we realize that it exists in a realm separate from convention. While paying obvious homages to classics of sci-fi past in terms of visual style, it is uninterested with genre traditions. His computer GERTY is not presented as a forbearing and chillingly cold machine, nor as an impossibly cheery AI with a heart of gold. It is simply a tool that Sam can interpret in whichever way he likes, either as friend or as device. Designed with the intention of fulfilling Sam's basic needs, this includes fixing his breakfast just as much as acting as confidant.

In addition to this, interestingly enough, the barren, alien landscape from which the film takes its name is not the star - Sam Rockwell (putting in an astounding and heartwrenchingly honest performance) is. The environment is beautifully, meticulously designed, but it is a vehicle for Sam's exploration of his reality, the perfect blank facade for him to act upon his emotions in the most nuanced way possible.

Nothing about Moon seems false or exaggerated, and it doesn't feel the need to work extra hard to engage the audience, simply inviting them to observe the behaviour of an ordinary human in an extraordinary circumstance. It carries undertones of allegory to the media-entrenched modern era, with carbon-copied stand-ins replacing authenticity and truth, but it is refreshingly subtle. Paradoxically, there is no sense of smoke and mirrors here - Moon is rife with true sincerity, and its strength lies in its fantastic ability to give a complete and whole sense of a man at his most emotionally vulnerable. At its core, it's a character piece, devoted to the exploration of what it means to know oneself when, after living alone for three years, you realize you do not.