Moon (2009)

Sometime back when I had lot of free time at hand, I had attempted to complete watching all the IMDB 250 movies. I had also tried to complete all the top science-fiction and animation movies in IMDB, as voted by users. I completed most of the movies on these lists. In those lists, I found this movie. I watched it in the same year that it was released. But I had no idea that it was such a good movie. I did not hear many good reviews about this movie from my friends, owing to the fact that most of them are not much interested in science fiction. So one day, I started watching this movie just because it made it to the IMDB top lists and since the rating for this movie was great. And I loved it. If you like science-fiction, you must watch this movie. Through these movie reviews, I hope that I can entice you to watch some of these not-so-famous-but-great science fiction movies that I enjoyed watching.

So what is this movie about?

As the title suggests, it is a story based on our Moon. This is a futuristic movie where humans have started mining on Moon, as we have run out of sources for fuel on Earth. This is the story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who is an astronaut living in a station on Moon, all alone for 3 years. He works for Lunar Industries and is eagerly awaiting his return to Earth as the 3 year contract is almost over. Because of long range communications failure, he is trapped on this deserted land without any contact from anyone on Earth. He occasionally gets some videos of his wife sent from Earth. Other than that, he has no contact with any humans. He is responsible for maintaining these harvester mining machines and for sending the mined materials back to Earth. One fateful day, one of the machines stops working and he goes to investigate that. This is where the actual story begins. Until this point, the movie is little dragging and viewer may get bored because of that. The movie gets interesting only after this point, but the problem is many people would have turned it off by then.

I would suggest you to watch the entire movie as the story is great and has a fresh feeling to it. Few movies that got released after this movie borrowed this concept, but when this movie came out, it was like breathing fresh air. There are some twists in the tale that you will not be able to guess.

If you have seen 2001: A space odyssey, you will be familiar with robots (read: evil robots). There is a robot in this movie too – called Gerty. Kevin Spacey has given his voice to this robot. Other than Sam Bell, this is the only character present in the movie for most part of the movie.

This movie raises lot of ethical questions about ways in which our science advancements could be used in future. I do not want to talk more about the plot, as I will inadvertently end up revealing it and thus ruining your experience of watching this movie.

You do not need big budget, elaborate settings, 1000s of actors and technicians to deliver a great movie. This movie proves that with a single actor and a single setting (Moon), you can deliver a great message with an amazing plot. Please do watch the movie if you like science-fiction or if you just like to watch something different. Plot is different and fresh. This is one of my favourite science fiction movies.