Sam Bell has a three year contract to work for Lunar Industries. For the contracts entire duration he is the sole employee based at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3 the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth so his only direct real-time interaction is with GERTY the intelligent computer whose function is to attend to his day to day needs. With such little human contact and all of it indirect he feels that three years is far too long to be so isolated he knows he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess and their infant daughter Eve who was born just prior to his leaving for this job. With two weeks to go he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured he ...
Review
Go see this movie! I've been lucky enough to have an opportunity to see this movie down here at SXSW and I am the better for it.
You don't really stumble upon many riveting independent scifi films that look beautiful(let alone don't contain aliens and space magic) and capture major emotional themes successfully. Moon accomplishes this and with very little CGI at that.
Sam Bell is an astronaut working for a corporation on the far side of the moon. His job Maintaining a lunar facility and the automated machines which are harvesting the moon's surface for Helium 3. The harvested material is then sent back to Earth to use as energy.
Sam is on the very last leg of a three year contract and is quite anxious to return to his wife and daughter. Barring any incidents Sam will be able to leave his solitude. But something does go wrong.
That said tremendous acting by Sam Rockwell carries this film mainly because he is basically the only person in the movie. I'm not talking about Cast Away meets the moon… This film explores loneliness much deeper than that and with much more emotion as well. Luckily for us there are no pieces of sports equipment on which the lead dotes but instead we're blessed with a monotonous talking robot(voiced by Kevin Spacey) reminiscent of Hal from 2001 notoriety.
I advise that people go see this film not only to support Duncan the director and Sam but also to explore to possibilities of space and the humanity of loneliness.
Don't go in expecting to find what I have discussed but go in expecting to find something inside yourself.