Moon

These are my notes for our next film:

Moon


UK 2009 106 minutes

Director: Duncan Jones

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Benedict Wong, Matt Berry and Dominique McElligott

Nominations and Awards

• Won Carl Foreman Award for special achievement in first feature film

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best British Film)

• A further 17 wins and 14 nominations

“Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind or another, including digital... The movie is really all about ideas. It only seems to be about emotions. How real are our emotions, anyway? How real are we? Someday I will die. This laptop I’m using is patient and can wait.”

Roger Ebert

Towards the end of a solitary three year stint mining helium-3 on the moon Sam Bell (Rockwell) experiences a personal crisis. His sole companion is a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) but just before his scheduled return he has a vision of a dark-haired young woman inside the base and then sees another figure outside on the surface of the moon.

The script is an original story co-written by director Duncan Jones. The film is in the tradition of the great science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s that Jones watched as he was growing up and the film pays obvious tribute to such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Silent Running (1972), Solaris (1972 and Alien (1979). In an interview Jones explained that the choice of the moon as a location for his story was deliberate:

"for me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it... There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don't know that much about it."


Duncan Jones is the son of David Bowie and his first wife. He made a deliberate choice to avoid the music industry and went to film school only after graduating from university with a degree in philosophy. He directed a number of commercials, including one for a controversial 2006 campaign for French Connection before making Moon as his first feature. The film had originally been intended for a straight to video release before its critical success at the 2009 Sundance Festival led to its commercial release across the US and in the UK. Following this success Duncan Jones has now directed Source Code, a big budget science fiction thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal scheduled for release in April 2011, and has announced plans to make another science fiction film called Mute to be set in the same science fiction universe as Moon in which Sam Bell will make a cameo appearance.