I've just seen Moon for what will probably be the first time of many before it ends its run in Portland. Unfortunately it's only playing at the Fox Tower downtown - which is a great theater, but an expensive one, and a ways away from West Linn. I don't want to ruin the film for anybody, but I do want to suggest that everyone see it, when they get a chance. There's a lot in it, for a flick with basically one and a half actors and two and a half characters. I left the theater wanting to see it again, not because it's a particularly confounding science fiction head scratcher (it really isn't, and I mean that to be a compliment), but because it's damned compelling. I'm about to start spoiling shit left and right, so go see it before you read this post. Don't look it up, don't watch the trailer (seriously, don't), just find out when and where it's playing and go see it.
It feels weird to write this, but... spoiler alert: the following might hinder your experience of seeing Moon if you haven't seen it before. If you have seen it, well, I hope this is interesting. Comment if you've seen it and you have something to say...
I might start by saying that I think science fiction is at its best when it isn't about the genre. When there's no backbreaking mythology, no showy eye candy special effects, and no masturbatory visions of the future, it's freer to develop real characters and nurture actual relationships between them.* Ultimately, I'm looking for a character-driven story - like I always am - that happens to take place in the future, or a different version of the present. The genre, when it takes a back seat to character and plot, can allow for certain things that a film taking place in the reality we know simply can't achieve. I'm thinking of movies like Alphaville, Primer, and Solaris; these are science-fiction films that let the characters address and sometimes create the major technological, ethical, and stylistic subjects that their genre allows.** In some cases, such as Duncan Jones' new film Moon, the genre allows relationships that simply cannot exist in the real world. Moon achieves genuinely moving drama not by flashy action or confusing future tech, but by subtle acting, honest and imaginitive screenwriting, and close, no-nonsense direction.
What makes the science-fiction I'm describing so powerful is that it assumes the genre. We might as well call the setting "futuristic," even if the films take place in a sort of alternate present or simply don't provide a date (like Primer or, I believe, Moon). If we can agree on the term "future," then I think what I mean to say is that this kind of sci-fi takes the future for granted. The long, hovering shots of the planet in Steven Soderbergh's remake of Solaris are impressive special effects, to be sure, but they seem to mean something in the context of the film (and in the greater context of its predecessor and the novel both films are based on); there are aesthetic reasons for the images as well as narrative ones. The long pan across the underside of the star destroyer in Star Wars, on the other hand, feels dumbfounding, drooly, and proud. George Lucas, God bless him, was making a spectacular sci-fi action flick, not a realistic drama in space.
Similarly, Moon treats the spectacle of its three biggest sci-fi conceits with unflappable disinterest. Yes, cloning is incredible and ethically questionable, artificial intelligence boggles and challenges (the notion of) the mind, and He3 mining is a hot-button topic at NASA right now, but there are no unnecessary montages of naked and pre-living clones being manufactured and no obnoxious reminders that the very human computer is a computer. (There is a basically superfluous "commercial" for Lunar Industries, the company mining the moon, at the top of the movie, but it can be forgiven, in light of what follows.) There is simply one man, his computer companion, and then another version of the same man.
Both men are clones of an original man, Sam Bell, who never appears on screen. Every three years a new Sam Bell clone is woken up and starts the same three-year contract with Lunar Industries. When the contract is up, so is the clone's life - as his body deteriorates, he gets into a pod, told he's returning home to Earth, and is incinerated in a flash.*** Of course, we don't know any of this until well into the film. The Sam Bell we're introduced to seems to be a real man: he entertains himself building a model town, exercises, and most importantly, he communicates with the wife and daughter he left on Earth, and feels real love for them. But when he gets in an accident off-base and is presumed dead, a new clone wakes up and takes over. Rockwell plays both, which is more of a feat than it seems. Especially once the new Sam has rescued the old Sam from the wreck, and the two live together. Rockwell's new Sam is suspicious of the old Sam, and aggressively but half-heartedly calls old Sam a clone. There is a subtle sense of defensiveness in Rockwell's new Sam, who seems to know or at least suspect he is a clone. The old Sam is the one who shouts that he is the real Sam, who ultimately contacts the daughter he never really knew, the daughter twelve years older than she should be.
The old Sam understands his younger self's aggression, and even comments that his wife, Tess, was right to criticize him for "flying off the handle." The differences between the two Sam's are, ultimately, based on one having spent three years alone on the moon and the other remembering only a life on earth. Rockwell plays the three-years-older Sam with a tempered calm and the younger Sam with a vital anger. Each flies off the handle at different times, but for different reasons and in distinct ways.
It may be because the characters are basically the same man, or because other than Gerty and a few three-line no-names, there are no other characters in the script, or because of the perfectly executed solo piano score, but I can't think of another movie except Adaptation in which one actor played two or more characters with such credible and compelling chemistry. Rockwell's two Sams go from ignoring each other in mutual mistrust to working together and, it seems, genuinely caring for each other. When the new Sam has to carry the dying old Sam back into the wreckage he was almost killed in, there is a moment of a sort of goodbye between the two of them that is very simply as touching as any tragic parting in any other movie. Between the powerfully deliberate development of the relationship in the script and the subtle maneuverability of Rockwell's acting (not to mention a dash of special effects magic - if the two Sam's didn't touch each other so much, their relationship probably would not be as real), the central conceit of the film, which could have been so much bombast and spectacle, becomes the backdrop of the most touching scene of male friendship I've seen in a theater in some time.
There is another surprisingly moving scene in the film, one that ranks with the dog Flike begging in his proud master's place in Umberto D. on a list of great scenes of non-human compassion. The third character in Moon is Gerty, a computer with a human voice, in charge of protecting and taking care of every Sam Bell that ever inhabits the base. With his luminescent camera eye and mostly flat intonation, Gerty obviously owes a great deal to 2001's HAL 9000. But while HAL was a cold, somewhat villainous rationalist, Gerty is a doting, caring, and adorably emotive companion for Sam. Gerty's charm is largely due to Kevin Spacey's voice work. Spacey gives Gerty a calm, soothing voice that, while usually robotic and cool, sometimes betrays a deeper connection to Sam than is expected. When the younger Sam asks Gerty if the robot wants both clones to die, Gerty responds with genuine alarm, "That is the last thing I want."
Spacey's voice, however, is not all that has me calling the computer adorably emotive. Gerty is also a few steps closer to human than HAL, physically. Where HAL was basically a spaceship with internal eyes and complete control, Gerty moves around the base suspended from the ceiling. The clones can have conversations away from Gerty and do things behind his back when they need to. He can operate the base as well as Sam can, and early in the film gets in the way trying to do a job that Sam is already doing. It's this eagerness to please that makes it so easy to compare Gerty to a faithful dog like Flike.**** As well as relative control of most of the base's moving parts, he also has a robotic arm, with a three-fingered hand at the end. As importantly, Gerty's emotional (or perhaps empathetic or even sympathetic would be a better word) state is conveyed to Sam via a yellow face on the front of the robot - an emoticon set that can show degrees of happiness, confusion, stubbornness, and sadness. It is simply easier to identify with a robot with an arm and a face than a robot without.
Both the arm and the face, then, as well as the voice are integral in the second most moving scene in the film, in which the old Sam, the one we still aren't sure isn't human, discovers that he is a clone. Gerty, for reasons we can't quite be sure of, tells Sam that his memories are implants, taken from the original Sam Bell, and while he tells him the emoticons on his face register deepening degrees of sadness. Sam turns away from Gerty, but still, not for Sam, Gerty's face changes to one with a dramatically downturned mouth and a tear on one cheek, and that three-fingered hand rises and, after a crucial moment of hesitation, gently falls on Sam's shoulder.
Both this scene of a genuinely sympathetic robot unsure of how to help its master (for lack of a better alternative, I'll fall hard on the dog analogy here) and the wordless goodbye between two clones of a man neither has met are powerful, devastating scenes. They are so affecting that it is easy to forget that you're looking at two Sam Rockwells on the screen, or Sam Rockwell and a smiley-faced robot with Kevin Spacey's voice. Rockwell's acting and Parker's script so perfectly differentiates the clones and develop Gerty that the lofty ideas of cloning and artificial intelligence fall away and are virtually irrelevant. Jones' direction, beyond not lingering unnecessarily on the inherent spectacle of science-fiction imagery, is close without being invasive. When the clones fight, it isn't a fight scene, when they joke it isn't comic relief; every scene is perfectly placed and consistent in style, tone, and pace. When Gerty volunteers to erase his memory so that Lunar Industries won't learn a clone has escaped back to Earth, he tries to comfort Sam by saying that both he and yet another Sam clone "will be programmed" as usual. Sam tells the machine, "We aren't programmed. We're people." It isn't trying to lay anything heavy on the viewer, the philosophical demands of 2001 and Solaris are in the film, but because they're serving as backdrop for the narrative rather than masquerading as narrative, they aren't so taxing. "We're people" is a primarily emotional line, not a philosophical one, and that's how the whole movie is. It's powerful and moving and touching, and happens to take place on the moon.
* That said, I whole-heartedly support and love the distinctly 80's vision of the future - the dark, ultra violent, post-rational/post-ethical/post-peaceful (and often, to varying degrees, post-human) world of Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Terminator, Robocop, and even Brazil. It beats the hell out of the rampant novelty of 50's pop sci-fi (blinking lights, whirring, buzzing, whistling robots, and all kinds of things "from SPACE!") and the overbearing social message of 60's movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet Of The Apes or the Star Trek series. Although even those three are favorites of mine. (And the social message may be a bit fuzzy in 2001, but I still think it's overbearing, even if it's a philosophical question rather than a political agenda.) In a way, every decade seems to have shown its true colors in its expectations of the future. In the nineties and the new millennium, I think it is telling that every new Hollywood science-fiction features has to be bigger, more explosive, and more intricately detailed than the last, yet the technology in the movies is rarely updated past Apple's next product. It may be that we are approaching the future too fast, that because today's wet-dream sci-fi gadget is tomorrow's everyday afterthought, most sci-fi writers simply can't imagine imagination radical enough to drop every jaw in a crowded theater. It wasn't twenty years ago the liquid terminator wowed us in T2. There aren't many ways to achieve oohs and aahs when today's biggest sci-fi blockbuster, Transformers, is based on technology that has literally existed for years in children's toys. Cue explosions.
** To those three films I would also add Ghostbusters and The American Astronaut, both of which establish a basically genre-based world so completely that comedy specific to the film is possible. There are jokes in Ghostbusters that would have been impossible in Blues Brothers or Animal House, simply because in Ghostbusters the possibility of New York City being attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is a given.
*** I don't want to talk about the ethics of cloning, and luckily, neither does Moon. Whether due to Duncan Jones' original story or Nathan Parker's script, the film lets the characters explore what is basically a grey area. The assumption seems to be that, as long as the clone has all the emotional and intellectual memories of the original, and does not know that it is a clone or when it will die, the ethics are questionable at worst, and ultimately nebulous. It is when the clones realize that they are clones that any ethical questions might be raised, but they are hardly addressed politically or didactically in the film. Instead, we are blessed with Gerty's brilliant crying face and robotic hand on Sam's shoulder.
**** Considering that the film mostly lacks female characters, and in fact makes a great deal of Sam missing his wife and daughter, it might also be appropriate to think of Gerty as a happy substitute for a lover and companion. Gerty cuts Sam's hair and prepares his meals, helps him when he feels lonely by encouraging him to "talk about it," and attends to him when he is bedridden - all traditionally roles that might be filled by a spouse. However, considering Gerty's main goals of protecting and "taking care of" Sam, and the immediate alarm I mentioned earlier, I find the dog analogy to be more fulfilling. (Naturally, my own fondness for dogs and dog-man relationships also drives me to this analogy, with the added quality of allowing me to namedrop De Sica's Umberto D.)
