Moon

At last a film that provokes as much as 2001. Moon, a film by Duncan Jones, starring Sam Rockwell as the isolated Sam Bell and Kevin Spacey as the ever-reliable computer, Gerty, does something a science fiction film should- not be science fiction. In Moon the desolate lunar landscape is purely a backdrop, nothing more, serving to deepen Jones' exploration of aloneness, sanity, love and ethics. Unlike science fiction cliché, Jones is wanting to do more than explore outer space, he is wanting us to look to the inner space, what it means to be human, what makes us tick.

Moon is set in the future when energy is produced from mining helium-3 on the moon. Each person who moves to the moonbase has a term of three years and Sam Bell is coming to the end of his time on the moon. Whilst out on the surface, Bell shockingly crashes his lunar vehicle, however, luckily Bell is awoken again inside the moonbase, unscathed, or so we think... Noticing something 'live' is on the lunar surface Bell gets the urge to go outside but Gerty disallows. Overriding Gerty's ubiquity, Bell finally manages to explore what is 'live' and discovers himself, Moon's monolith. What then follows is a look at human values and how important it is to comfortably seperate humanity from science. Far from an indictment of science, Moon, in the tradition of H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov is warning where rationality could lead us; we should cherish what it means to be human, always holding the hand of science but never embracing it. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky mused: ' If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen'.