Saturday, April 24, 2010

Moon

The 2009 film is the kind of SF film that's frustratingly rare: an idea driven exploration of the human condition. It's also, like the 1980 Lathe of Heaven a Dickian movie that manages to feel more true to the spirit of Philip K. Dick than most of his works that made it to the big screen. The lonely sadness and paranoia is lightened by surprisingly humane gestures from a character we might not expect to exhibit humanity.

There's a lot of loving homage to 2001, but the sterile interiors are grimy and littered with post-it notes, and the trope of the calm voiced unreliable cyclopean A.I. is subverted.

The modest budget is used economically but effectively to convey a barren but beautiful lunar landscape and a distant industrial complex tended by a single lonely man with robotic assistance. It comes closer to respectfully capturing the costs and risks of sending humans to work beyond low Earth orbit in the 21st century than any I can remember.

1 comment:

Jeff said...

Thanks for this. I've had this film in my Netflix queue for a while, but now you're making me look forward to it all the more.