Moon
Directed by the son of music icon David Bowie (Duncan Jones), Moon, starring Sam Rockwell in the lonely lead role, is a mesmerizing, inescapably thrilling kind of a film. Better still, it does all this while also emitting a profound sense of claustrophobia and dread. One that hasn’t been seen for many years and could easily have taken the movie in an entirely different direction that would surely not have proved half as fruitful.
One of the strangest films to arrive on the big screen in quite some time, Moon begins slowly, building tension while telling a simple and what appears to be obvious story: one man on the moon with little to do other than operate harvesting machinery that converts gas into the world’s now leading source of energy on Earth. Half an hour into the film you could be forgiven for thinking this is all the film appears to be, and it is then that the proceedings take a confusing and abstract term, suddenly asking the viewer to question everything he or she is witnessing and has witnessed.
The best thing about the film, really, is its simple nature – this hiding something much more complex and distinctly unsettling. Indeed, the viewer gets the impression that the plot could have been about almost anything – Hair Loss treatment, mother / son relations etc – and turned this on its head to reveal something perversely dark and sinister.
Watch Moon if you want to see a film that genuinely breaks new ground and sheds new light on a sub-division of science-fiction that so often gets it wrong. There may be little actual action and no explosions, but that’s not to say that you shouldn’t watch this and keep an eye out for Duncan Jones’s next film.