Moon

Here is a true space odd­i­ty: a low-key, British-fund­ed sci-fi thriller pro­duced by Sting’s wife and direct­ed by David Bowie’s son. Hav­ing tak­en pro­fes­sion­al cov­er behind his mother’s maid­en name, Dun­can Jones (chris­tened Zowie Bowie) has earned his shot at fea­ture film­mak­ing via a splashy career in adver­tis­ing, where he direct­ed a kung-fu les­bian spot for French Con­nec­tion which, improb­a­bly, was every bit as good as it sounds.

Moon is a thought­ful but imper­fect alter­na­tive to the brain-dead block­busters that dom­i­nate the sum­mer. With an aes­thet­ic bor­rowed from Dan O’Bannon’s ​‘used future’, Jones con­jures the ghosts – both lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal – of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (or per­haps Soderbergh’s glossier ver­sion) in the sto­ry of a min­ing con­trac­tor whose three-year stint on the moon is near­ing an end.

Sam Bell (Sam Rock­well) is an employ­ee of Lunar Indus­tries, a con­glom­er­ate that con­trols the extrac­tion of ore from the sur­face of the moon to ful­fil the earth’s ener­gy needs. This is a con­vinc­ing land­scape of indus­tri­al machin­ery, sweat and lone­li­ness – a know­ing reac­tion to the shiny sur­faces of 2001. Indeed, Sam’s only com­pan­ion is a com­put­er, GER­TY (Kevin Spacey), whose dis­pas­sion­ate voice is both famil­iar and sinister.

And yet Moon is full of mis­di­rec­tion. In an atmos­pher­ic first act, Jones effec­tive­ly turns our famil­iar­i­ty with sci-fi arche­types to his advan­tage, as the audi­ence strug­gles to decode the film’s sig­nals. Should we be expect­ing the tech­no-fear of 2001? The ET intrud­er of Alien? The space psy­chosis of Sunshine?

This para­noid guess­ing game induces a creep­ing sense of cab­in fever that mir­rors Sam’s own descent into appar­ent mad­ness, as a series of hal­lu­ci­na­tions leads him to ques­tion his sanity.

Jones has achieved a lot with very lit­tle. Clear­ly made on a shoe­string, Moon is nev­er­the­less full of ambi­tion. Though it would have been eas­i­er (and cheap­er) to con­fine the action to Sam’s quar­ters, there are numer­ous excur­sions to the sur­face. And though the spe­cial effects are more Space­balls than Star Wars, Gary Shaw’s pho­tog­ra­phy pro­vides a high-class fin­ish, while Jones’ glossy direc­tion betrays the ear­ly influ­ence of Tony Scott.

If any­thing, the craters in this par­tic­u­lar Moon are a result of Nathan Parker’s screen­play rather than any tech­ni­cal or finan­cial lim­i­ta­tions. A twist at the halfway mark reveals the dark secret behind Lunar Indus­tries’ cor­po­rate phi­los­o­phy, but as the threat to Sam shifts from his san­i­ty to his life, the film los­es its inte­ri­or, psy­cho­log­i­cal men­ace, and replaces it with an exter­nal threat that is too remote to sus­tain the dra­mat­ic tension.

Park­er is also guilty of some log­i­cal gaffes (Sam’s hal­lu­ci­na­tions are a vision of some­body he could nev­er have met) and pedes­tri­an res­o­lu­tions. The lat­ter stages of the film are benign and air­less, fail­ing to pro­vide either a seri­ous cri­tique of a cor­po­ra­tion unhitched from its moral bear­ings, or a dra­mat­ic nar­ra­tive with suf­fi­cient punch.

As ever, Sam Rock­well is an engag­ing pres­ence, here bal­anc­ing his trade­mark charm with a haunt­ed alter ego. But Kevin Spacey is a duff choice as GER­TY, a piece of stunt cast­ing that only serves to dis­tract from the her­met­ic iso­la­tion of the rest of the film. Hol­ly­wood has seeped in through the air­lock, but this is a defi­ant­ly British film. It’s one we can be proud of – in moderation.