Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Moon

Moon was an excellent film, it was visually great and the characters were personable.  It had elements of so many films we have seen this whole semester that is was a really good movie to end this semester on.  I haven't seen a lot of Sam Rockwell's work but he was indeed a good actor chosen to play this part.  His character is the most important thing and the fluidity of it is also very important.

The movie starts out what we think are the last remaining weeks of Sam Bell's three year contract on the space station on the moon mining helium three.  Sam has been up there all alone for three years left to entertain himself and maintain the ship.  How terrible, stuck all alone for three years, the way you would miss just being around something alive.  So of course he starts talking to himself and to Gerty the awesome robot that is there to protect him.  I wouldn't need three years to start talking to myself I know that, in that sense Sam is emotionally strong that he remains as sane as he does during the three years.  Sam has a wife and daughter back on Earth that his misses so much and he can only see video messages she leaves him and cannot really talk to her or to anyone because the communication system has been destroyed or so he thinks.  Sam goes out to repair something and sees something that causes him to crash his truck, he wakes up in the infirmary to Gerty telling him he was in an accident but Sam walks in on Gerty having a live conversation with the main station leading him to be suspicious.  He talks Gerty into letting him out and he discovers his own body at the crash site still alive.  He wake up the other Sam Bell and they are weirded out by each other.  Which is expected, the theme of clones or having a duplicate have been in the last few films we have viewed.  Another Earth had a mirror planet, Primer had doubles because of time travel, and now in this film there are clones.  Turns out that there is a secret room that holds hundreds of Sam Bells just waiting to be revived for their three year contract.  Really it seems like a smart plan to have clones to the job but the part that is funny is that Gerty seems more than capable of doing all the tasks Sam could do.  The emotional level that Sam holds is the whole movie however.  This movie has been impacted by Silent Running and Gravity and Space Odyssey visually and in the plot and character shaping.  Sam reflects Freeman from Silent Running very heavily by talking to himself and making friends out of his surroundings.  Gerty is the most human out of all the characters, the computer shows a personality and that is one of the aspects that is not addressed completely in this film.  Gerty states that he is there to protect Sam but Gerty also shows that he is not stupid and he thinks for himself sometimes.

The future of science fiction is always interesting but one of the best things to think about while viewing new films or television shows is the impact that the past and current events play into the whole that is created.  We are products of our environments and that can be shown through many different methods.   

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