Moon (DVD)

...a brief description. The way Moon was described it sounded like a thriller or at least a mystery of some sort, but at least it seemed to be my kind of film.

Story

With only two weeks to go, Sam Bell is excited about returning home to his wife, Tess and daughter, Eve after 3 years on the moon. He has been working for Lunar Industries to supply a gas that helps with environmental and energy problems on Earth. It is lonely ...
...problems. He is able to view recorded messages from Tess and has the company of a robot called “Gerty” to look after him. As he heads out to complete a task, he has an accident when lots of rocks come tumbling onto his vehicle and he is seriously injured.

Then he awakens in the infirmary, where Gerty has been looking after him. His memory is blurred, but gradually he starts to recover back to his normal self. He feels ready to go ... more

On our way to South Africa, we took two long journeys, stopping off in Doha on the way. On the first stretch of the journey, I was pleased to discover that we had in-flight entertainment, including movies. There weren’t many films I recognised and most of the older ones were films I’d already seen. Then there were a few new films, so I had a look through these for something with action in it or a thriller. As these weren’t sorted by genre, I went by a brief description. The way Moon was described it sounded like a thriller or at least a mystery of some sort, but at least it seemed to be my kind of film.

Story

With only two weeks to go, Sam Bell is excited about returning home to his wife, Tess and daughter, Eve after 3 years on the moon. He has been working for Lunar Industries to supply a gas that helps with environmental and energy problems on Earth. It is lonely after he loses direct contact with Earth due to satellite problems. He is able to view recorded messages from Tess and has the company of a robot called “Gerty” to look after him. As he heads out to complete a task, he has an accident when lots of rocks come tumbling onto his vehicle and he is seriously injured.

Then he awakens in the infirmary, where Gerty has been looking after him. His memory is blurred, but gradually he starts to recover back to his normal self. He feels ready to go back out in no time, but Gerty is insistent he should stay inside, as he has been instructed by Lunar Industries to keep him indoors. Sam ignores him and goes out anyway, and what he discovers is another man who has been very badly injured. But the most sinister thing is that this man looks exactly like him. In fact, he claims to be him. Who is the real Sam Bell?

Just about the whole story is set on the Moon, and mostly within this spaceship with only the identical Sam Bells and Gerty the robot. This makes it extremely claustrophobic and also a bit dull. I can understand the experience this film intends to give you that is actually quite disturbing, in a way a bit like Open Water and Castaway. Perhaps it is a cross between the two films. The trouble is, I found it very hard to keep my eyes open while watching this film. I didn’t like this film at all. To be honest, for me it was boring, and if you were hoping for something entertaining, this is definitely not the film for you. If a film is not entertaining, I expect it at least to be educational in some way. This being a sci-fi does in a way fulfil this criterion, but it offers nothing new or that has not been done better elsewhere.

Determined to see it through, I had to keep rewinding and watching parts of this film again as I had dozed off during the scenes! The film was more of a moving drama style than either a thriller or mystery, and I suppose this was why it disappointed me so much. However, I have definitely seen better dramas, and the thing with those sad or moving types of films is that there needs to be something that livens up the story, or else your audience just gets depressed. In this film, there was nothing exciting I could find about it and given that there were only two characters throughout most of it, it was quite monotonous.

Acting/Characters

There are only really two or three characters worth talking about at all in this film, as all the others are just brief appearances to link up the story. The reason I say two or three is because I am counting Gerty as a character, and Sam Bell could be counted as two separate characters although played by the same person. In fact I felt they had very different personalities.

I thought Sam Rockwell was brilliant as both Sam Bells. In fact, their conflicts were the only things that helped keep me awake at all during this film. Obviously as there are no other characters, Rockwell has to try extra hard to keep the film going. Although I don’t feel he succeeded in this, I think he gave it an excellent go and therefore I commend him for this.

To my surprise, Gerty played by Kevin Spacey, on the other hand was not so interesting. Yes, he is meant to be a robot, but it does appear that he is meant to be quite emotionally aware, so I had hoped this would lead to him actually having a personality. Instead he is more of a commentator with hardly any active role in the film. It would have been better if he had turned out to be more, either as an enemy or friend of Sam, which would have helped improve the two-dimensional nature of the film. As this is only a robot with a human voice, he has no real face, and instead communicates facial expressions via a ‘smiley’ or ‘emoticon’ as they are often called, on his screen. So basically, when he is okay, he smiles, when worried he gives the raised eyebrow expression or sad face and so on. Still, this doesn’t seem to reflect emotion, but this should have been obvious given that a lot of people communicate via these online and they never mean anything!

Film qualities

Set in space, this is one aspect of the film you might expect to be particularly good. However, along with the element of claustrophobia, the scenes are kept very bland and basic. Although there seem to be lots of rooms in the spaceship and home-like areas, it is all very modern and standard. It makes you feel even more trapped just watching these poor mugs living there. Space was somewhat realistic, but again, lacking in sights. It was just totally uneventful.

Classification

The film was rated as a 15. I think the rating was more to do with the disturbing nature of the film, than the violence or language used. In fact, swearing could not have been very frequent as I didn’t catch on, although I know there were scenes of the two Sam Bells arguing and fighting. Although I’m not sure the rating is really justified, I doubt that many people under 15 would want to see this kind of film anyway. In fact I wouldn’t recommend it to most young people generally. It is definitely not aimed at them and doesn’t seem to have much to make it worth them watching. I’d be very surprised if many kids sneaked into the cinema to see this rather than the latest horrors.

Conclusion

Personally, I don’t feel that this film is worth watching at all, and to be honest, I wish I hadn’t bothered as I could have just slept properly for an hour or so instead of this broken sleep that left me even drowsier. It is just too dull and depressing but without anything original for us to appreciate in it, so became quite a chore to watch. Unless you are a space fanatic or have a lot of trouble getting off to sleep, there isn’t really any point in watching this one. If it is on telly, you might want to change the channel!
 

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