Moon (2009)

For a modern low budget sci-fi film of a first-time director, "Moon" is surprisingly good. Yet, it helps again to prove my theory that the good ideas for movies today are so scarce that a movie that has them presents them in isolation and that's it. "Moon"'s plot twist is very interesting but the movie has only that to show. In the hands of a master, in the hands of Kubrick, it would have been a masterpiece of sci-fi. Like this is just a good modern movie. Speaking of Kubrick, "Moon" starts as a Shinning in 2001's space, but after the twist is revealed, at 45 minutes into the film, the remaining 45 minutes go after a thing that the audience knows sooner or later will happen. The surprise ends. What remains is a brilliantly handled film, with superb performances (or should I say performance, as there is only one main actor), and great space set pieces, that make it hard to believe how cheap this movie was. Directed by David Bowie's son (!), Duncan Jones (his second film, "Source Code", is now in theaters), the story is set in a not so distant future. A corporation extracts green fuel from the moon's underground, and places a man there every three years to supervise operations. Sam Rockwell, plays that man, and we see him just as there less than 2 weeks to go on his contract. Alone for almost 3 years, he has a routine to keep sanity, and his only companion is Hal-like computer, voiced by Kevin Spacey. But what has been a quiet 3 years suddenly turns to sci-fi frenzy, as strange things start to happen. Then, driving a tank on the lunar surface, he has an accident, but wakes up again (not knowing how), on the base, where suddenly there is another man there, who proves to be the identical of himself... Who is this man? A clone? A figment of his imagination? How much does the computer know? What are the real plans of the corporation? (oh, how sci-fi loves corporations!) The movie is not very good in disguising the true story behind it, so the thrill is not on the unraveling, but on the way it is done, specially by Sam Rockwell's double performance. Funny, melancholic, and at times beautiful and hopeful in the space sequences with classic music in the background, it's a sci-fi film to see, if you are a fan of the genre. A pity they stumped on the same idea over and over again, that makes the paranoid parts easy to bare. More dilemmas and plot paths could be added, but for an inexperience writer/director, it's a hell of a good start, and a good nod to Kubrick!