“Moon” — A FilmCritic Review

Director: Duncan Jones
Writers: Duncan Jones (original story), Nathan Parker (screenplay)
Actors: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey (voice of robot), Kaya Scodelario

Reviewed by: Chris Cabin
Film Critic Rating = 3.0 out of 5.0 Stars

“Screenwriter Nathan Parker has fashioned a nifty, timely little nugget of space buffoonery out of the aforementioned proceedings and, despite minor gaps of illogical lunacy, it works.”

Sam Rockwell plays, ostensibly, the only character in Moon, the debut film from Duncan Jones. His role is that of Sam Bell, a meager laborer at an energy-mining colony on the moon who, lonesome and remote, engineers the extraction of Helium-3, the world’s new-fangled energy resource. His only friend: a computer named Gerty which is fitted with emoticons and is voiced by Kevin Spacey. My very real hope is that when all this space craziness becomes real, we make robots and droids a bit livelier than all these HAL scions.

Nonetheless, Moon is a fascinating and ambitious, if not wholly successful, exercise in low-budget gadgetry. Unencumbered by ILM bombast, Jones’ imagery benefits immeasurably from the simplicity of the lunarscape design, sculpted nicely by cinematographer Gary Shaw and production designer Tony Noble. But the ace in the hole, as he so often is, is Rockwell, doing some of his best work to date here. CGI may carve out the physical fight that erupts between the two Sams, but the psychological and physical deterioration of the clones is rendered troubling and believable by the Confessions of a Dangerous Mind thesp.

Read Chris Cabin’s full review at FilmCritic.com.

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