In the future, after we have stripped Earth of all, or nearly all, of its natural resources, our primary source of energy will come from the moon.  The company, Lunar Industries, extracts the substance helium-3 from the moon’s soil.  Once enough is collected, it is loaded up and shot back to earth in a little shuttle.  Lunar Industries’ base on the moon is Sarang and it’s operated by Sam Bell.  He is the only employee.  He is the only person on the moon.  It’s a lonely job.

Sam isn’t completely alone, he has the base AI, Gerty, who roams about in various robot forms.  Other than that, Sam only has pictures of his wife, Tess, and their young daughter, Eve, and the sporadic recorded video messages he receives from them and the corporate bosses.  A live conversation would be nice, but the satellite is down, and it seems too expensive to fix and not considered a high priority (I think we’ve all worked for companies like that at some time or another).  The good part for Sam is that he is just days away from leaving the moon and heading home, his three year contract is almost completed.

The bad news for Sam, is that he just may be losing his mind.  The loneliness is getting to him; the stark loneliness is crushing him; as Seal sang, “It’s loneliness that’s the killer”.  He just doesn’t feel the same, he misses his family, he misses other people in general.  He has also begun to hallucinate.  On his way to one of the harvesting machines on the surface of the moon, Sam thinks he sees someone and crashes the rover vehicle into the harvester.  Beat up and bruised, Sam falls unconscious, trapped in the vehicle.

Later, Sam wakes up inside the base with Gerty watching over him, monitoring his recovery.  He doesn’t seem to remember the accident, and a message from Lunar Industries tells him to rest and that they are sending a team to repair the failed harvester.  How did Sam make it out of the vehicle?  How did he get back inside the base?  Is he really alone on the moon?  Can he trust his bosses?  Can he trust Gerty? Is Sam finally bug-out crazy?

To say any more would be to ruin this movie.  Moon plays the strings of paranoia, isolation, mystery, and dread with perfection.  The movie plays out in a simple manner, but its emotional core is as complex as quantum physics and string theory; this is truly great science fiction.

Moon feels like a distant relative of Kubrick’s 2001:  A Space Odyssey,  and not just because Gerty is reminiscent of HAL.  But where 2001 is cold, sterile, and detached, and is more to be admired than actually liked, Moon has humanity and has life.  Sam Rockwell, who plays Sam Bell, gives a genius performance, and it’s his performance that grounds the film and holds it together.  Sam Bell is the reason it all seems plausible, and he is the reason the movie is funny, moving, and gets under the skin.

Moon‘s one flaw, I felt, was the closing voice over, giving a tidy ending to a movie that, in my opinion, should have had a more ambiguous one.  But I can’t hold that fault against it.

5 out of 5
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