movies: moon

First rule of finding yourself at the end of a long stint in space... Never trust large corporations or robots...

Although that's not 100% accurate for Moon, it's definitely that kind of movie.

In a lot of ways it shares a visual look with the first Alien movie. The resemblance was pretty strong in certain spots actually... not only to Alien but also to a few other movies... things like Sunshine, Solaris (even though I haven't seen either version properly), Silent Running (things starting with S it would seem)... not in a bad way, but it did feel as though Moon was a movie I was familiar with. Maybe it's just that there are only so many stories you can tell about people (or in this case a single person) "trapped" in space (although, this movie takes places on the titular Moon).

Having said that, it still managed to feel fresh. Possibly because it's not a "something's coming to eat me" kind of movie... it's much more internal and contained than that, and definitely posits a few "what would you do in that situation?" questions.

It's also one of those movies that's kind of hard to talk about because not a whole lot really happens, and most of what does happen revolves around the central plot point... and that's just a big ol world of spoilers, so I'm not going anywhere near that...

I can say though that Sam Rockwell is great as the only flesh and blood person we meet throughout the movie (everybody else is seen through video monitors or dreams)... his ability to readily able to take on very divergent characters serves him well here. Kevin Spacey is also creepily good as the robot/computer GERTY... that flat, dry vocal quality that he excels in is perfect here.

I also thought that it was interesting that all of the exterior shots were done with models rather than CGI... you can definitely tell the difference (but at the same time my eye did identify them as models right away... but then I do that all the time with CGI).

So, yeah, there's not really much else I can say... it's definitely worth a look.

yani's rating: 3 smiley face robots out of 5