Thursday, October 29, 2009

Movie review - Moon

In Moon, Sam Bell (Rockwell) is coming to the end of his 3 year contract to collect Helium3 on the Dark Side of the moon. Since a solar flare disrupted communication to Earth, Sam has had no one to interact with other than GERTY, the computer/machine that is there to help him out. The isolation is beginning to get to him and one day on a routine check around the moon, he hallucinates and crashes his vehicle. He next wakes up after the accident to GERTY running various tests on him to check that he's okay. Or does he....?!?!?!

Sam Rockwell is an interesting actor. Not a supastar but definitely a cut above your ordinary actor and capable of carrying a film. It's a good thing Rockwell is such an excellent and quirky actor because he's pretty much the only person we see onscreen for about 95% of the movie. We see him going through the procedures of his work, completing various activities to stave off the boredom, and complaining to GERTY about the conditions, followed by the things that happen post-crash. His performance is an excellent and believable study of someone possibly going stir-crazy in isolation.

One of the good things about Moon is that it so easily could have followed various sci-fi movie conventions. I can't really say too much about what happens but aspects of the following COULD be in there - isolation madness, clones, evil clones, aliens, ghosts, split personalities, evil machines, friendly machines, practical corporations, evil corporations, cheating spouses, patiently waiting spouses, everything is lie, everything is true...yeah. Actually come to think of it, some of the issues aren't fully resolved and we're left with a vague and ambiguous ending!

The explanation of what's going one is possibly the weakness of the movie because sometimes when something was explained, I mentally went *Oh, is that it?! I expected something more convoluted!* Also, the pacing was pretty uneven. There are moments where nothing was happening (kinda like when you're all alone in space), and then suddenly there was a heap of activity and I was left with a *what?!* moment.

When I walked out, I immediately thought it was a '6' movie - passably enjoyable but I'm not sure I could watch it a second time. On further thought, it is a very interesting movie and I'd like to encourage people to watch it because it is challenging when you're trying to figure out what's going on. But I still think I wouldn't watch it a second time.
6-7/10

1 comment:

Vanilla Bear said...

You lost me after the first paragraph! Wtf!