Zowie Bowie

A small, personal story wrapped in the trappings of classic Sci-Fi epic, Moon manages to be both derivative (most notably, of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001(1968), but with only a touch of that film’s monumental pessimism) and deliberately rebellious in its treatment of Sci-Fi euphemisms. Moving through familiar territory and yet sparked with a spirit all its own, like any great work of genre cinema Moon’s future-world scenario and super-slick techno-artistry are put to the service of a story that ultimately downplays the traumas wrought by technological possibility in order to dig deep into the traumas of people being people.


The film, directed by first time director Duncan Jones (once known as Zowie Bowie, son of Sir David Bowie), begins with a pitch-perfect advertisement for the company that contracts an astronaut named Sam (Sam Rockwell) to live and work on a space station on the Earth’s Moon for a three year stretch, accompanied only by a HAL-meets-Johnny Five (2001 and Short Circuit [1986]) robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and able to communicate with his wife and child on Earth only via taped video message.


Shot within a grueling 33 days on a fair budget in regards to indie films ($5 million), but on an incredibly low budget in reference to mass market Sci-Fi pictures (Independence Day (1996) -$75 million), Moon relies on a major twist that would be criminal to reveal. Suffice it to say that Sam is at once not as alone as he thought he was, and as fundamentally lonely as anyone could ever be. This dramatization of Sam’s sudden, tragic self-awareness gives Rockwell a platform for a terrifically exciting dual performance which, thanks to over 450 seamless, non-showy effects, and a magic of chemistry, works magnificently.


What marks Moon as a potential Sci-Fi game changer is the complexity of its philosophy on The Future, one which allows for both limitless faith in human feeling and skepticism over the human cost of innovation, particularly in regards to Saving the Planet. 2001 predicts that the more human-like machines become, the more they’ll take on the worst of humanity and, as an added bonus, that humans will lose the passion and compassion that makes them human in direct proportion to the degree to which they engineer machines to become more human-like. Moon approaches a similar scenario from a very different angle, imagining that the artificial intelligence that humans create will embody the best of what humanity can be, but will probably be used to the ends of, if not evil, than at least the individual-indifferent banality that keeps a capitalist society ticking along.


“I took common Sci-Fi illusions and assumptions that people make and changed that in the course of the film” said director Duncan Jones at the San Francisco International Film Festival, detailing his film’s “inverted common trend of technological mistrust in Sci-fi.” He described in a question answer session after his film was shown that the all encompassing aspect of Sci-Fi film is “telling human stories but having the world be Sci-Fi, because then the environment makes us see the characters in different ways we wouldn’t look at before. In other words, Sci-Fi can be intelligent and smart, but also very simple; the stories are the baggage that humans bring to create trauma.



Moon Trailer