Slashing The Seats

Like its titular body, “Moon” is designed to play with viewers’ emotions, using its near-future setting to serve up some timeless awe and a little, very contemporary worry. The whole thing hangs around at the more cerebral end of the Sci-Fi mothership, being particularly close to the mannered tone of “Solaris”, while it’s real-world style technology pokes around in your memories of “2001”.

In this particular future, the Earth is heavily reliant on Helium-3, a wonder element being mined on the moon at a facility where manger Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) pines for a return to his wife and child back on Earth. While routinely out and about in his Lunar rover, Bell starts to hallucinate, causing a crash that sees him awaken back at the base, confronted with a grumpy doppelgänger, while his only companion is an emoticon-faced robot named Gerty – played with marvelous efficiency by Kevin Spacey – who is unable or unwilling to answer his questions.

This is lengthy, grown up science fiction, rewarding patience and contemplation. Moon handles some deep psychological questions and while some lead down the well trodden path of looking at our future, many are rooted in the mundanity inherent in even the most exotic of career choices, and fits them around an unnerving atmosphere of unease and suspicion.

The look of the film is striking, Lunar modules are claustrophobic for all their polished white surfaces, creating a maze-like look that adds to the disorientation, while Director Duncan Jones makes the most of the enormity of space lurking just outside. This is not a thriller that needs to rely on Cat-In-Wardrobe jumps, instead building a disturbing unease throughout to give us a true post-modern vision of horror.

Here, the scares aren’t caused by masked killers, but through the perversion of identity and the collapse of grand, guiding narratives, along with the faceless, nation-less corporations that replace them, the emotional bite coming from Rockwell’s tireless work as he realises he’s putting himself through all this for nothing, his life reduced to utility.

The only gripe is a running time that seems long for the sake of it, meaning the whole thing teeters on the precipice of pomposity at times. But if you can forgive this then its a wonderful character piece that insinuates itself early on, while the imagery hangs on for a long time after viewing, building to a paranoid ending that fits perfectly.

A confident, spooky work that deserves an audience along with its Sundance plaudits.

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