Moon (2009)

No Spoilers!! (Though it's an older movie, many haven't seen it, and I would hate to ruin its twists for anyone)

Director: Duncan Jones

A fairly quiet, still-underrated modern sci-fi classic featuring a brilliant performance by Sam Rockwell.

Rockwell plays the character Sam Bell, the lone worker on a moon station where he he oversees the sending off of a resource - known as helium-3 - that has helped vastly reduce Earth's reliance on other forms of energy. Sam is nearing the end of his three-year stint at the station, where he has worked in total isolation except for his computer/robot assistant GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). With only a few weeks to go, however, Bell makes a discovery about the station and possibly himself that throw his entire existence into a horrifying new light.

Moon is a great example of that rare science-fiction movie that plays things simple, without sacrificing the intelligent speculation and the connections to human emotion that make for the very best of the genre. With relatively little reliance on special effects or dazzling sets (though they are perfectly crafted), this movie does what the best sci-fo movies do: plausibly imagine the impacts on a person's psyche and emotions of the advancement of science and technology. It doesn't take long to establish that Sam's job of gathering and sending of helium-3 has been an invaluable boon to mankind as a whole. But as you learn of its cost to Sam himself, some serious questions arise. Questions that one could easily apply to many of the wonderful advances in technology in recent decades and those in the decades to come.

Sam chats with GERTY, his robot assistant and a welcome
departure from the artificial intelligence units that you
may be used to in sci-fi movies.

Being a movie with a single actor inhabiting the screen for about 99% of the entire time requires a certain skill level to keep an audience engaged, and Sam Rockwell was more than up to the task. The incredibly versatile Rockwell has to display a wide range of emotions here, all without any acting partners to play off of. I imagine that this is something which not many film actors could do, and it is captivating to watch Rockwell work through the wild ride that the story sends him on.

It's also worth noting how Moon echoes certain earlier, iconic space flicks, though modifying things to satisfying degrees. The notion of the "one savior in space" is one that's at the heart of cult sci-fi classic Silent Running (a film with a good premise but, in my opinion, some awful execution). And the presence and voice of GERTY can't help but remind one of HAL in landmark sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Again, though, GERTY is a rather welcome variation of HAL, which had long been overly mimicked to the point of unintentional parody.

My hat's really off to writer and director Duncan Jones for this one. I haven't seen any of his other movies (though I've heard that Source Code is quite good), but I'll be checking at least one of them out sooner rather than later.