Movie Review: Moon (2009)

“The Sky is Filled with Stars, Invisible by Day”

by Sylvia Bond

Whenever Sam Rockwell is in a particular movie, I notice him. Not because he himself is particularly noticeable, but because he is not. Particularly noticeable. In other words, he is a chameleon blending and melting into the characters he plays, so that I have to do a little squinting to make sure it’s him. His characters have run the gamut from the starstruck fanboy-slash-unwilling astronaut Guy Fleegman in Galaxy Quest to the pale and uber nasty Wild Bill Wharton in The Green Mile. (And let us not forget the role of Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, what a trip that was!) So I like to go see Sam Rockwell in whatever he’s in.

In Moon, Sam Rockwell is easy to spot because he plays not one but three versions of himself, which was a good thing because when he first shows up on screen, he is a long-haired hippy dude, and I had to ask myself, “Is that him?” And naturally, being Sam Rockwell, each version of himself is ultimately different, from the skin outward.

The plot of this movie is classic sci-fi horror, with Sam (that’s the character’s name) working in isolation on a space station on the dark side of the moon. He’s at the end of a three-year contract processing helium-3, which is clean energy for an energy hungry Earth; the mother Corporation for this little venture is Very Proud of its own efforts. Sam’s a one man show at the plant, monitoring the systems and taking out the sturdy moon rover to repair various rolling processors. The movie shows the processors chewing up the helium-rich rock and spewing out the leftovers all over the place. Anyway, that’s his job.

Sam lives alone in the space station, which, thanks to the gritty reality of many recent sci-fi films, is dirty and dusty and looks like it might smell bad. Sam spends his free time working out, getting delayed messages from Earth from his wife Tess and young daughter Eve, and shaving down bits of wood with an Exacto blade to resemble parts of his home town. He also interacts with GERTY, the all-seeing, all-knowing service computer, who provides Sam with conversation, advice, first aid, and a rough kind of companionship. There’s your setup, which takes a nice, slow time being, er, set up.

The setting has shades of Space Odyssey all over the place, or Aliens, or Event Horizon, or any of a bunch of sci-fi horror movies like this, where you have an isolated human in space and you just know some Bad Stuff is going to happen. Soon. Someone will perhaps show up and eat Sam, or rip off his legs or something. Maybe something will explode out of his chest, or he’ll get some disease and Earth won’t take him back and he’ll rot parts of himself off while plaintively calling over the radio for help. (Very Twilight Zone, that.)

I especially kept expecting GERTY to go Rogue Computer on poor Sam; GERTY has long, mobile arms with pincers at the end that look like they could poke his eyes out in two seconds flat. Or rip off his arm, anything! Maybe this is because my experience with so many sci-fi movies has been like this, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that the villain of the piece was the computer. Not so here; in this universe, GERTY is the least of Sam’s worries.

On a side note, Sam is a guy. In spite of the girly name, GERTY is a guy, even though the computer has no feminine attributes, and except for the little smiley face that quasi-reflects the type of conversation that Sam and GERTY are having at that moment, displays no overt emotion at all. (The voice of GERTY is played by Kevin Spacey with a warmer version of the “All your base are belong to us” voice. Awesome!) The name of the rescue team is Eliza, but the three hulking dudes who are set to rescue Sam are anything but feminine. The two corporate suits that Sam talks to over the delayed message system are guys. Everyone’s a guy.

The two exceptions to this mostly male cast are Tess, Sam’s wife, and Eve, Sam’s daughter, who are never seen in real time. It’s like Gladiator all over again! But seriously, I didn’t need to recognize that pattern to know that this movie was written by a guy – the focus (Oh, the FOCUS!) on female boobage is a dead giveaway. Only in a man’s (Sam’s) fantasy is a woman’s underwear the subject of fetish-like detail: here it is pure white, and trimmed with lace and a pink ribbon. On the other hand, we don’t get to see Sam’s underwear at all, so my question of boxers or briefs goes unanswered. (The union suit does not count.)

Conversely, we do get a scene where Sam takes a shower and is nude from head to toe. This is remarkable to me because I notice these things; I’ve long been on a campaign of Equal Opportunity Nekked Nudity and am apt to keep a scorecard of whether or not men and women are equally naked in the same movie. Here, the men are more naked than the women, so props to whoever made that decision. (And, I do not know whether or not Sam Rockwell used a Stunt Bottom, but I’m here to say, nice fanny!)

At one point, with two weeks left to go on his contract, Sam starts having visions. He sees a young girl, which eventually causes him to crash his rover into one of the processors. Back at the station, Sam wakes up and is all clean and cared for (unlike his pre-crash condition of being pale, unshaven, and unwashed), and GERTY puts limits on his activities, one of which is that he’s unable to leave the station. But, sensing something is amiss, Sam tricks his way out; though, truth be told, GERTY gives in rather like an adoring governess and is pretty easy to convince.

Sam ends up rescuing the guy who was in the crashed rover, who turns out to be himself, giving us Sam A (the untidy, worn-out one) and Sam B, (the lithe, brown, and active one). The two haggle and fight, but eventually figure out that they are both clones and that the Corporation, who has ostensibly hired Sam A to run the station, has purposefully blocked the communication between the moon and Earth to keep all this a secret. The mystery unravels at this point, without a lot of the usual clichéd OH-MY-GOD running around and mysterious deaths occurring down dark tunnels of the unused parts of the space station where no one should be anyway. No, Sam A and Sam B sensibly explore and discuss. No one dies from this type of curiosity. No body parts hit the window from the outside. The only blood comes from Sam A succumbing to radiation poisoning as he’s throwing up a lung or two and a tooth. This sense of realism was not only sophisticated but refreshing.

The plot is not hard to follow and presents a story that on the surface is fairly quiet and subdued. This subtlety is supported by the color palate, which is limited to shades of white and grey and black. There are shots of red, like Sam A’s cap, or yellow-orange, like Sam B’s wrist wraps for boxing, but they are more like exclamation points in a sentence, startling but singular. The special effects for the moon’s surface are also low key and not very dramatic, but still effective because they show us a realistic working-man’s moon. And, unlike NASA’s photographs of the moon, these skies are filled with stars.

So back to Sam A’s blood that he starts throwing up and basically never stops. He’s obviously suffering, but except for Sam B’s kindly gestures, Sam A is on his own and will probably die. And yes, he does die, but so what? Who cares? He’s a clone, so what does it matter?

It’s this question, which lies just beneath the surface, that presents what I think is one of the most fascinating ideas of the movie. Turns out that Sam A and Sam B (and Sam C, and so on) were cloned from a Sam Bell, who is still alive and living on Earth. (With his daughter, but not his wife, ‘cause she’s dead, which is typically what happens in these kinds of movies. Sorry to go on and on about it, but seriously. Get a new trope, will you?) Either Sam Bell knows he was cloned (and is getting compensated for it) or he does not (and is not), but regardless, Sam Bell is unaware (or seems unaware) of the living condition of his cloned selves. Which gives the story a cold and creepy tone; the power of the Corporation to do as it pleases for its own gain now becomes the enemy.

Speaking of greedy Corporations (and we were, weren’t we?), the moon is a finite resource (as well as being hollow, if you believe in that sort of thing). Or do the moon’s rocks re-heliumize themselves after a period of time? Anyway, it certainly is cheaper to grow and feed and supply a clone to work for a few years until the radiation poisoning gets them than to hire a real human. Because the clones all die, the three-year contract doesn’t matter, and the Corporation never has to pay them! Talk about unlimited profits! Genius, right? (I wondered though, if a Corporation that could dream up clones, why on earth couldn’t they develop computers or robots to do the same work?)

The issue here is the sanctity of life, but not in a regular blowing-up-abortion-clinics way, but rather to ask the question, when you create a life (or many lives, as with the clones), what is your obligation to that life? According to the Corporation, it is permissible to clone Sam Bell and have the clones run the station in order to provide cheap (one assumes), clean (one also assumes), and unlimited (debatable) energy to the millions on Earth, without regard to Sam’s clones’ mental state or emotional needs.

Throughout the film Sam A is constantly longing for home and reaching out to Sam B for the touch of another human, even as limited a touch as a high-five. When Sam A finally does get his human contact (Sam B carries him to bed), he is too sick to appreciate it. The pathos of this scene is incredible. But the Corporation’s needs are fed, so who cares about some old clone anyhow?

At one point, Sam B scolds GERTY and says something along the lines of, “Don’t say that, we’re human.” If you copy a piece of paper, it becomes another piece of paper and will remain as such. Or at least till you recycle it. (Which you really should do, when you’re done with it.) Likewise, if you copy a human, it’s a copy, but it’s still human, and should be granted the same rights.

Sam A (and Sam B and so on) has all the skills and memories of his Original. He loves his wife and daughter and misses them; he has pictures of him and his family plastered all over the place. He creates a replica of his home town and longs to be there. He has good days and bad and like most humans, doesn’t want to be replaced by a machine. Sam A tells GERTY to back off so he can do the repairs himself; humans like to feel useful, you see. (Which is EXACTLY what the Corporations are counting on, but enough about them now.)

Here’s something else that I thought was rather eerie and not quite right. Sam A is having visions of a young, dark haired girl who we learn is Sam Bell’s daughter Eve, all grown up. But since Sam A only possesses a particular three-year history, during which Eve would be no more than four years old, this means that Sam Bell’s current experiences are bleeding through to his clone. Which further supports the idea that what the Corporation is doing is completely unethical, because what Sam A is doing is becoming Sam Bell. He is becoming himself.

This unethical treatment of clones is troubling beyond the idea of FREE slave labor, which many Corporate CEOs are still petitioning for, in spite of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Hell, if they could they’d do away with health care and vacations and give all of us little cots so we could sleep under our desks and never have to go home. To them, us needing to be home is just a disruption to THEIR bottom line, and they want that sucker to go UP! These are the same idiots who think it is a terrific idea to strip mine a heavily influential terrestrial body whose very presence gives us high tides and low tides, harvest moons and August moons, new moons and Blue moons, silvery moonlight and glowy Halloween moons, and, best of all, comforting goodnight moons. For PETE’s sake, what’s wrong with developing wind energy and solar power?

However, the specifics aren’t the issue here, as fun as it was to think about all those kinds of moons, but the idea behind them. And that is, SOME people think that other people are expendable. But what are we if we allow this to become the way we treat each other? Oh, I love movies like this!

Sylvia Bond is a ten-year technical writing veteran with too many degrees under her belt to count. She lives in Colorado, but does not ski, preferring instead to spend her money and time at the annual Great American Beer Festival, taking road trips across the United States, and reading historical fiction from the comfort of her fluffy green arm chair. She has been involved in fandom since 1993 and been writing fanfic since approximately 1993. What she finds most amazing about fandom (besides the open heartedness of fans and the sheer amount of creativity) is how visible fandom has become. “In my day,” she says, “we had to hide behind P.O. boxes to get fanfic. But nowadays, people wear t-shirts that shout their affiliation and share their shiny toys on the internet.” It’s a wonderful world.

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