Directed by newcomer Duncan Jones, Moon is a slow-burning, sleeper masterpiece and probably the best British film of the year (if not the best film period) by a long chalk. Serial bit-part actor Sam Rockwell delivers the performance of his life as Sam Bell, an astronaut manning a mining operation on the Moon, and slowly going mad with loneliness. Providing Sam with company is Gerty, a clunky looking robot whose retro casing is covered in postit notes and stains from coffee mugs, voiced with a detached drawl by Kevin Spacey in a cute homage to Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey – although unlike Hal Gerty actually helps Sam when the chips are down.

When he’s not driving out on the surface in his moon buggy to maintain the automated harvesters, Sam spends his days on the station building a huge scale model of his hometown or dreaming of his wife. Fortunately for him his three years are almost up and he’s going home – or so he believes. But then the film shifts gear, moving from a poignant study of human loneliness to an incredibly original mystery via a series of seismic twists that put the film on par with Dark City (another lo-fi Sci-fi masterpiece). The first of which (and this is less a spoiler than a hook to tempt you) occurs when Sam accidentally crashes into a harvester. Waking up in the medical bay he is confused as to why Gerty wont let him out onto the surface. When he does manage to venture out he discovers his own body in the crashed harvester.

Sam Bell number two revives and the two men, suspicious and confused, enter a tense face off, at the heart of which is the question of their very identity and humanity. This is where Rockwell shines, playing the two men like different sides of the same personality – one logical and detached and the other desperate and emotional. But just when you come to the conclusion that what you are seeing played out on the screen is merely a metaphor for schizophrenia, the plot pulls the rug out from under you once more, going off in an even darker direction.

With its down beat tone Moon has been compared to the Sci-fi cult classics Dark Star (John Carpenter) and Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull), but I found more in common, at least in the first half, with Solaris – by which I mean the original three hour Russian version by Andrei Tarkovsky, rather than the recent hatchet job – sharing its aesthetic minimalism and the focus on the themes of solitude and madness.

Another impressive aspect of the film is the special effects, which are predominantly achieved through the use of models rather than CGI, something that is immensely refreshing in today’s high technology environment, and gives the film’s sets a highly appropriate sense of unreality and vulnerability. Moon is an utterly stunning, disarming achievement.

Words > Dean Bowman

Film review at Cinema City Norwich: