Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Moon

by Bob Clark

On July 20 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history by setting foot on the moon, a feat imagined by writers like Jules Verne and many others for countless centuries, but never dared or thought possible until NASA sought to make that fantasy a reality. By the time the eagle had landed and made its giant leaps for mankind, President Nixon famously shared “the most famous phone-call ever made from the White House” with the astronauts, but he kept his statements brief and subdued. Many assumed (likely correctly) that his restraint was out of respect to the late President Kennedy, whose bold Space Race boast to put an American on the lunar surface had spearheaded the proud progress of the Apollo program.

Perhaps, however, it was also because of how keenly aware Nixon was of how wrong things could have gone. Nobody had ever forgotten the dangers of the program thanks to 1967’s Apollo I fire, which took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White. Nixon’s staff had even prepared a speech to the American public in the anticipation of a possible failure with Apollo XI. “Fate has ordained,” the speech would have reaed, “that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” It is this noble, nightmarish fate—to endure the isolation and separation from Earth—which makes up Duncan Jones’ debut feature Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, and little else.

Nearing the end of a three-year contract to the Lunar Corporation to harvest energy-source Helium-3, Rockewell’s Sam Bell is a neurotic mess. Cut off from civilization by non-operative satelite communications and reduced to watching reruns of sit-coms and transmissions from his wife and child, Bell is anxious to return home and escape his drudgery and isolation on the moon. While performing routine operations in a claustrophobic base and driving on the surface in massive rovers, Bell is aided the robotic Gerty, voiced by Kevin Spacey, who remain’s Bell’s only companion on the isolated base, until an accident occurs and another Sam Bell is found, identical to the first.

Is he hallucinating? Are they clones? Answers do eventually arrive in a script penned by Nathan Parker from the director’s story, but before then Jones spends his time well building up Bell, Gerty and the base itself as fully-fleshed, vivid characters worth investing our both our sympathies and attentions in. Rockwell shines in what increasingly amounts to a dual-role—no actor has performed this convincingly against himself since Jeremy Irons as the Mantle twins from Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. Spacey’s Gerty shines with a bright monotone, offering a refreshingly empathetic spin on what might’ve otherwise been a basic HAL-ripoff. Equally deft with crewmembers as well as actors, Jones provides an convincing, intimate environment with which to populate his characters.

With model-effects and set-design work from artistans from Silent Running and Alien, Jones creates a world with a keen visual continuity for those and other classic sci-fi films from the 1970’s. Aided by Gary Shaw’s bright, clear cinematography, Jones’ cinemascope framings are greatly favored by the all-white palate of the lunar base, recalling dystopian minimalism at its most accessible and daring in 2001: A Space Odyssey and THX 1138. The lived-in, dirtied quarters bring out a hint of Solaris, a flavor deepened by the story’s mysterious plottings and the restraint with which he shoots and paces their proceedings.

Unlike many other directors today, both first-time and veteran, Jones shows a rewarding patience with his camera, favoring static angles and slow pans that bring out the detail and depth of otherwise simple sompositions. With his spartan style and clear-eyed vision, he delivers a tight feature that can stand confidently alongside the best efforts of Lucas, Kubrick and Tarkovsky—directors who knew how to get the most mileage from out-of-this-world stories by holding back before they pitched. With its emphasis on an eerily possible set of scientific hypotheses, Moon stands as one of the most original debut-features and sci-fi efforts since Andrew Nicol’s Gattaca. Far unlike the space-opera of Star Wars or the recent Star Trek, and far more focused and confident in its premise and presentation than Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, Jones’ film is a promising start and a godsend for fans of hard, intellectual science-fiction. The atmosphere may lack oxygen, but the film is a breath of fresh air.