06.22.09
On the Moon
We saw Moon this past Friday. I’d been awaiting this film for a while now and it was well worth it. I was skeptical when I first came across the trailer — it makes it seem like an amalgam of various other sci-fi films before it — 2001, Alien and even Event Horizon. But the film has a completely different narrative that I can’t say anything about here. To do so would spoil it completely.
I do however want to remark on the art direction and style of the film. Instead of a hyperreal and future forward view of the future, it’s almost tied to the way the films mentioned above depicted the future of now. We’re past 2001. We’re not yet at the 2122 of Alien but the almost retro-future that is depicted in those films feel far more realistic than the futures of sci-fi films today.
The future in Moon is clean and smart but there’s a lot of dirt and use too. GERTY, the HAL-like computer voiced by Kevin Spacey is grimy and stained — as the only pseudo-form of life that astronaut-janitor Sam Bell reacts with in a physical basis, it’s not unexpected. Bell places his coffee mug on GERTY, Post-It’s and more. It’s a lovely humanist touch for a computer that’s not human.
As the movie progressed, I felt less like Sam Bell lived on a space station on the moon and rather that he lived in a home, on a planet that we can see every night, in a future not too distant from now.
