In Ryan Gosling’s latest hit Project Hail Mary, he plays an astronaut who finds himself alone in space, until he runs into a similarly isolated extra-terrestrial. There’s no such respite for the character in Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009).
In Moon, Sam Bell is all by himself on his mission, with only the artificial intelligence system named Gerty for company. Unlike Project Hail Mary, there are no laughs or lump-in-the-throat moments to make Sam’s ordeal bearable.
Moon is steered by a single actor, Sam Rockwell. Other characters appear only as distant images on a shaky satellite feed.
Sam Bell is an employee of the Lunar corporation, which is extracting helium from the moon for use on Earth. There’s only enough work here for one person. Sam has to maintain his spacecraft and venture out every now and then to load canisters with helium to send back to Earth.
Sam is stultified by the routine and talks to himself when he isn’t chatting with Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Sam has two weeks left until his contract ends. He can’t wait to go back to his wife and daughter. But then he makes a shocking discovery.
Based on a story idea by Duncan Jones and written by Nathan Parker, Moon is a low-budget, high-impact space drama that packs several complex ideas into its 97-minute runtime. The film can be rented from Prime Video.
Jones’s directorial debut is a fantastic showcase for Sam Rockwell’s protean skills. The only actor in the frame for almost the entire movie, Rockwell displays enough range for a handful of actors. Rockwell deftly portrays Sam’s discovery of the awful secret behind the mission, ensuring that nobody else is needed. Kevin Spacey is wonderfully smooth too as Gerty, the HAL 9000-like omniscient entity.
Sam’s mission is filled with metaphorical possibilities. This lonely cog in the machine speaks for every corporate drone assigned to important and yet dull tasks. Sam is also a symbol of a hyper-advanced, automated age where humans are fit only to operate machines. Moon is among the films that anticipated the frightening social fragmentation brought on by the AI apocalypse.
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