Film review: Moon (Director: Duncan Jones)

The dark side of the moon: A man, alone, in an outpost, millions of miles from the earth, supervising the harvesting of Helium-3, the lifeblood of the world's energy needs. Space: in Duncan Jones' debut, there is no infinity, no freedom, nothing to discover, nothing to explore. Space is a narrow, claustrophobic rom0m, bleak, desolate, dark, devoid of colour. The exitance of the only inhabitant, Sam Bell (remarkable in a double role: Sam Rockwell): stifled in routine, boring, monotonous, empty.

Space is not welcoming, it's not to be explored but to be escaped from. Earth is the realm of life of freedom, soace means hopelessness and enslavement. Enslavement to money and enslavement to technology. Here Moon is clearly in the tradition of the greatest space film ever, Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

In fact, Kubrick's classic is more than a major influence, it provides the framework on which the atmosphere, the look and the underlying view of space are based. It also provides a counterpoint from which the film can differentiate and eventually emancipate and find its own theme, its own mood, its own story.

This closeness to 2001 and - to a lesser extent - Solaris is the film's weakness - and its strength. The continual references stifle Moon during much of its first half. Like its hero trying to first understand and then fight his destiny, a destiny forced on him by others, Moon struggles to come into being as its own independent entity. It takes long to find its rhythm, the allusions to 2001 and Solaris almost becoming unbearable.

As Sam wakes up from his half-life, as he becomes himself and starts making his own decisions, the base's computer Gertie emancipates itself from Hal, the controlling, merciless, almost psychopathic villain of 2001. And as Sam sheds the role he has to play and becomes an individual the distinction between reality and dream, experience and hallucination becomes clearer, the Solaris-like terror of imagination and paranoia lose their power.

Moon is a small film, devoid of action sequences, confined to a limited, claustrophobic space. It's a film about human emancipation, about the power of the individual, about the strength of the human spirit. The emancipation of Sam images that of Kubrick's Dave but is also signified by the film's emancipation from its inspirations (and perhaps even its director's from his father's shadow - Jones is the son of David Bowie who started his career with an homage tp 2001). Moon is a remarkable fim in that it proves that far from action and CGI science fiction can still ask humanity's big questions, if not answer them.