Review: Moon (2009)

(Warning–several spoilers below, beyond what can pretty much be inferred from the trailer.)

It’s remarkable the lengths to which one must go these days to completely isolate a character in science fiction. Much of the work of Moon (dir. Duncan Jones) is spent explaining just how it is that a person can become utterly disconnected from the live flow of networks while still being able to receive prerecorded media. So, the conceit here is that we have discovered a way to supply 70% of the Earth’s power with solar energy; that “H3” from the sun is trapped in lunar rock on the dark side of the moon; that Lunar Industries, Ltd. employs a staff of one in its mining colony, Sam (played by Sam Rockwell), whose three-year contract is almost up; that communications relay satellites have been damaged by some solar flare; OR that mysterious dark pylons have been erected around the base in order to block any communication with Earth (not to neglect the ‘fiction’ elements in favor of the ‘science’ determining the protagonist’s seclusion).

This is the first in a series of reversals that Moon performs in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey. These obelisks, rather than appearing as unknown technological wonders and beacons of interplanetary communication, are used to block any transmission, carving out a solitary, dark space within already given technological systems.

Jones (born Zowie Bowie) obviously wanted Rockwell to have the space he needed in this role, and Rockwell’s particular style works nicely with the overall themes of the film. Hinting at the compressed life span and strange familial ties between identical Sam clones, a humorous father/son relationship develops between various versions. Sam shows Sam how to properly carve wood with the thumb closer to the blade. Sam tells Sam in his more decrepit state, “Jesus, your fly is down. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

The lunar base’s AI, named Gerty and voiced by Kevin Spacey, is also there for Rockwell to play off of. In yet another 2001 reversal, HAL 9000′s strangely emotive red eye is replaced here by Gerty’s small LCD screen with a severely limited range of emoticons––smile, mumble, blank, cry. Gerty’s sole function is to keep Sam safe, apparently even at the expense of the station and its mission. Seeing as this company is willing to dispose of (living) clones and reproduce them ad infinitum, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t program their steward more thoroughly. If the clone-on-clone relationship more or less works as comic relief, the one between AI and clone is a bit more sappy. Sam at one point declares, “We’re people Gerty, you understand?” When Gerty agrees to erase his own memory so that no trace is left of the Sam clone who rockets back to Earth.

With the dialectic of command/control paranoia and utopian space boosterism of 2001 thoroughly undone, we are left in the face of these sentimental closing moments wondering just what it is the film is getting across. Moon was screened at the Tribecca Film Festival, and the Q&A afterward detracted a bit from any interesting take on the place of the space opera genre in contemporary network, post-cyberpunk culture that the film itself may have had. Especially notable was Jones’s groan-inducing response during a Q&A after the screening to the question of whether this was a critique of corporate culture: “I dunno man, you tell me. I’m just a filmmaker.”

Regardless, the premise itself of isolation within networks does serve as a striking thought experiment–it seems that it’s not just Sam’s psyche that becomes isolated on the dark side of the moon once off the grid. Based on the very logic of this isolation, stored memory (which is implanted and uploaded into the clones) slips out of sync with the “liveness” of the present tense of networks. If there is one thing to take away from Moon’s mash-up of space opera with our contemporary networked discourse, it is the degree to which memory is now fundamentally reliant upon being distributed, networked.