Member review

Moon was, director, Duncan Jones first start at a full feature film, and what a start it was! Even though it had a much lower budget than any other thought-provoking science fiction film it still managed to reach and possibly exceed the high bar placed by other, similar, types of films. Although, this movie is no clone of any other sci-fi film as it brings up a very interesting, and uncommon subject matter.

Moon begins by introducing our main character, who is no clone of any other sci-fi movie character and is named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) who works for the company Lunar Industries. He is the only worker on this lunar base, besides his robot colleague GERTY (Kevin Spacey). Here we find that Sam doesn’t have all that long until he’s allowed to return home and meet his wife (Dominique McElligott) and daughter (Kaya Scodelario). The only human contact Sam has had over the past 2 years has been via sending video messages back and forth from the Moon to Earth. This is one of the major factors that influence his isolation, and due to this Sam begins to start hallucinating. He first hallucinates a teenaged girl inside of his station and then again he spots her while driving a harvester which causes him to crash. To the viewer's surprise, Sam then wakes up, unharmed to the sight of GERTY, watching over him. Sam himself notices some strange occurrences and decides to investigate, he then makes a very unexpected discovery back in the harvester and starts to doubt Lunar Industries motives. He is now set on returning to Earth.

Even with Moon’s rather low budget it still manages to pull off some pretty realistic special effects, from that of the lunar surface itself to the spaceships flying around creating a very immersive movie experience. Nicolas Gaster did a particularly good job at editing the movie and with the help of cinematographer, Gary Shaw, they create an amazing image and overall feeling of isolation and a grim nature throughout the film. Clint Mansell also helps a lot with these feelings with the soundtrack as it ads more depth and continues to make the audience feel on edge constantly. However, out of all of the production team, it’s quite hard to forget about Nathan Parker (Writer) and Duncan Jones (Director). Their contributions to the film were necessary to create this unique movie, as they did not set out to just make a clone of any other movie, they set out to create something new and exciting, and in my eyes, they have succeeded.

I am not the only one who has this opinion for this movie as Moon was nominated and actually won several film awards, one such award won was a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Director which Duncan Jones proudly, and quite rightfully, took home. To conclude Moon is, quite frankly, an amazing movie full of unbelievable twists and turns, that has little to no faults, from its stellar acting performances (Especially from Sam Rockwell who was required to act in quite a unique way) to it’s dramatic themes and very interesting subject matter, which is why I am awarding it four stars out of five, so it is a must-see for any sci-fi film fan.