Hippies saw it in the night sky, but couldn't grasp it. Pink
Floyd set up a base camp, but abandoned the mission. Now decades later and
miles above our heads, director Duncan Jones has found the coordinates of
self-discovery in his debut film. Destination: "Moon."
Son of intergalactic glam-rock god/goddess David Bowie, it's no wonder Jones' first feature is in space. But centering solely on Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey, it's a minimal affair. Hopefully, dad isn't embarrassed.
You don't need to lose everyone else to find yourself; you must lose everything to literally find yourself.
An ace in the sleeve as a character actor for years now, Rockwell stars as Lunar Industries employee Sam Bell. Contracted for three years of solitary labor, Bell extracts an energy-crisis-reversing fuel from the moon with no one to speak to but a deadpan Spacey voicing his robot Gerty.
Serving out his solitude, Bell's only remaining contact with earth is through the video messages he shares with his wife and employers. Beyond the minor comfort these one-way conversations provide the only other tethers he still grasps to sanity are his daily routine and the sanctity of his mission. But as the final days of his contract approach, reality slinks into the shadows. After Bell suffers an almost-fatal accident on the job, Jones' creation convulses into light-speed.
Native Americans take vision quests to uncover their hidden truths. The counterculture sojourns down lost highways in the desert. But in "Moon," Jones posits they both get it wrong. You don't need to lose everyone else to find yourself; you must lose everything to literally find yourself. Bell learns this firsthand. Waking up in a haze following the accident, his body howling in delirium, he finds another Sam Bell.
They say a true test of an actor's ability is the "one-man show." Rockwell does that twice in 97 minutes--without the use of black holes or DeLoreans. "Warp 9, Mr. Jones."
Crafted with classically sharp precision and caustic wit that often penetrates the film's austere atmosphere, "Moon" is at home with sci-fi pioneers like "Alien", "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris." But these references are nothing more than a launch pad.
Jones understands there's more over the horizons of genre films than well-mapped clichés. He also knows the myriad possibilities they hide. With microscopic insight Jones diligently mines those stylistic conventions as deeply, revelatory sites of the self and beyond. From these black depths, he casts his debut in sparkling existentialism and darkly prophetic ore. The outcome is vein-chilling.
Marrying the cold, corroded imagery of space with a lone soul's tenuous warmth, "Moon" questions humanity while begging to find it; bowing to its predecessors while refusing to conform to anyone's blueprints.
Space is no longer the final frontier for Jones. It's merely the means for finding our own plateaus; the ledges where we stare mystery in the eyes, French-kiss oblivion, waltz with fate. Alone with no one but yourself, space is a transcendent ring where we fistfight the infinite and unexplainable. But how do you wrangle destiny? How do you conquer yourself? The answer is in the stars.