Duncan Jones (2009)

The BFI showing I went to had been transferred from NFT2 to NFT1 in response to ‘overwhelming demand’.  With the director coming along to introduce his film and take part in a Q&A afterwards, the place was nearly full.  Unless this was some hard-to-fathom publicity coup on the part of BFI, you can only assume that a more likely  explanation is the correct one – another programming miscalculation.    The genial Duncan Jones was given a hero’s welcome on arrival and there’s plenty to applaud him for.  This is, as he said in his commendably brief introduction, an independent British film and it’s attracted widespread praise.   Jones has certainly carried out his stated intention of evoking science fiction classics that he remembers from his youth (he was born in 1971), including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien.   His success with an extra-terrestrial story is pleasingly apt too because his father – Jones was once Zowie Bowie – was Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust.

Sam Bell, the protagonist of Moon, is, to quote Wikipedia, employed by:

‘Lunar Industries to extract helium-3 from lunar regolith, for much-needed clean energy back on Earth …. He is stationed for three years at the largely automated “Sarang” lunar base (“sarang” means ‘love’ in Korean), with only a robotic assistant named GERTY … for company.’

Moon dramatises the crises of the last few weeks of Bell’s lunar exile, including the discovery that he’s a clone.  Jones, who devised the story from which Nathan Parker developed a screenplay, always wanted Sam Rockwell for the part of Bell – but if you’re going to make a drama that deals with the poignant fragility of human identity you need someone more distinctive and penetrating than Rockwell.    As an actor, he seems to have been cloned:  the multiple versions of Sam Bell that materialise are inadvertently meaningless because the competent, hard-working Sam Rockwell is a generic presence.   I don’t doubt that Jones’s admiration for Rockwell is genuine but it illustrates the director’s order of priorities – perhaps the order of priorities of sci-fi film-makers more generally.   I think they don’t want actors with personalities strong enough to divert attention from the fruits of their visual imagination and their technological achievements.   It’s surely no coincidence that, as in 2001, the liveliest character in Moon is a piece of machinery:  the computer HAL (voiced by Douglas Rain) upstaged the astronauts (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) in Kubrick’s epic and the robot GERTY does the same here, thanks to Kevin Spacey.   At first Spacey’s voice is too self-consciously insinuating but it grows more compelling as GERTY is revealed to be infinitely co-operative – and more intriguing as the only alternative to watching and listening to Sam Rockwell.

Photographed by Gary Shaw and with a production design by Tony Noble, Moon certainly looks good, even if the visualisation of the moon as a dark, cold landscape and the palette used inside and outside the spacecraft – black, dark blue, silvery grey – are just what you’d expect.    The human details are clichés without technical wizardry to redeem them – the supposedly moving exchanges between Sam Bell and the wife and child he left behind, the fragments of popular culture from planet Earth which emphasise how away from home the hero is.  This time it’s TV sitcoms like Bewitched and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (although it’s hard to see, if Moon is set even in the fairly near future, how those would be part of the memory of someone of Sam Bell’s age).

31 August 2010