Moon

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

SPACE ODDITY: Sam (Sam Rockwell) meets himself while on a moon mission in Duncan Jones' debut film.

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B]

Marooned on the dark side of the moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) starts seeing things — namely, himself. Toward the end of his three-year contract manning an automated mining station for Lunar Industries (whose logo adds a surreptitious "E" to its initials), Sam begins to fray, physically and mentally. Lingering transmitter damage has cut off direct contact with Earth, leaving his only option for direct conversation a sentient computer named GERTY, voiced with affectless reassurance by Kevin Spacey. When Sam crashes his lunar rover during an ill-advised mission, he awakes to find his airtight outpost repopulated with another version of himself, although which is the real and which the hallucination soon becomes unclear. Whether he's conversing or playing ping-pong with his alter ego, the movie relies on a combination of practical and digital effects, well-accomplished enough to overcome the distraction of Rockwell's dual roles.

Based on Moon's all-white mise-en-scene and fondness for spatial dislocation, Duncan Jones (whose father, David, changed his surname to Bowie once upon a time) has obviously worn out his copies of Solaris and 2001, which is a better place than most to start. The movie successfully imagines a distant but recognizable future in which the planet's energy problems have been solved by a transition to fusion. But we discover eventually that consumption has only been displaced and not eliminated, and that the true fuel source is not lunar rock but something far more precious.

Jones' first feature never quite gets out from under the titanic shadow of his obvious inspirations. The movie feels like a full-length homage along the lines of Roman Coppola's CQ, a dream within a dream rather than a soup-to-nuts vision. But the influence feels as if it's come by honestly, rather than pasted on; Jones is not trying to impress us with his knowledge. Moon chokes in its last reel, skirting the ambiguous terrain of Tarkovsky and Kubrick in favor of a too-pat ending. But he creates a world worth soaking up for an hour and a half, an engrossing journey in the realm of the selves.