Moon: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Duncan Jones’ Moon has the word ‘classic’ written all over it. It is one of the best science fiction films in a long, long time, one that is faithful to the development of the genre and to the tradition of the battle against the Machine that was inaugurated with Kubrick’s 2001. In many ways, the film owes a great debt to Kubrick’s masterpiece, but also to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, for it reworks the latter’s themes of isolation, alienation and identity confusion. The film was reportedly made for only 6 million dollars, but it has the look of a 60 million dollar film, one that happens to have a fresh and innovative screenplay.

The premise is a simple one: Sam Rockwell plays a mining engineer named Sam Bell who has been stationed upon the Moon and is nearing the end of his three year contract. He is, apparently, though, beginning to suffer from cabin fever, for he has begun to hallucinate and see “ghosts” that may, or may not, be real. If you haven’t yet seen the film, then you might want to stop reading here, for I will now proceed to reveal the film’s central mystery in order to excavate its main thematic structures: after suffering an accident in his moon rover while on a mission to recover canisters from a harvester (the harvester owes a debt to Lynch’s Dune) Bell awakens to find himself mysteriously back inside the compound under the watchful eye of his HAL-9000-like computer companion named Gerty 3000. Soon, things get even weirder when Sam makes his way back to the scene of the accident only to find a double of himself still trapped, unconscious, inside the wrecked moon rover. He retrieves this double of himself and heads back to base, where he tries to fathom the mystery of this clone. Is he the one who crashed? Or is he the double of the one who crashed?

It turns out that the awakened Sam is, indeed, a clone. Not only that, but the Sam who crashed in the accident is a clone, too. The original Sam, these two clones soon discover, returned to earth 12 or 13 years ago. Ever since his return, and apparently unbeknownst to the original Sam, he has been replaced by a clone every three years, for the lifespan of each clone is only three years (reminiscent of the four year lifespan of the replicants in Blade Runner). The two new clones, in order to get back to earth, decide to awaken a third clone to help them…

The film is, in short, brilliant, for it is an excavation of our contemporary culture, or rather atemporary culture, disguised as a story about a man trapped on the moon. The thing about the moon is that it is a landscape that exists outside of History: nothing ever happens there, and life does not exist. It is a topology of a perpetual Hell of the Same, in which Time has vanished. The situation is precisely the same on Mars, and it is interesting that it is just these two extraterrestrial bodies that our ahistorical late capitalist society is obsessed with colonizing, for the essence of this society, too, is that Time does not exist and History is no longer: the planet is being overlaid with a thin crust of a civilized Hell of the Same, in which shopping malls, airports and theme parks–not to mention fast food restaurants–are conquering the planet and displacing and replacing the local and the authentic; in short, cultures which have grown up through the slow temporal metabolisms of History.

The goal of our Historyless society is, as Baudrillard has pointed out, simply to repeat and reiterate simulacra, or meaningless clones, without aim and without end, like cancer cells. Sam Bell’s situation on the Moon is an interesting miniaturization of this nihilistic and pointless metabolism.

There is a mythic dimension here as well, since these clones are essentially replaying the myth of the dying and reviving god that originated in the Near East a la Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, etc. Readers of Frazer know the pattern well. The cloned Sam’s attempt to break out of this cycle and make it to earth weirdly recapitulates the advent of the historical singularity of the incarnation of Christ, whose Event breaks the cycle of the previous dying and reviving gods with a unique and once-only occurrence.

Hell is the place, furthermore, of repetitive, meaningless actions: thus Sisyphus carries the stone up the hill and it rolls back down every day; Prometheus’ liver is eaten by an eagle every night and grows back again every day; Tantalus will never reach the food that dangles just out of his grasp and so on. Thus, in a brilliant reversal of traditional cosomology, Duncan Jones turns the cosmos upside down and puts Hell up in the sky. The goal now is to get out of Hell not by going “Up,” the universal direction of salvation in all ancient religions, but by going “Down” toward earth, where souls incarnate on the physical plane. Jones thus performs a wonderful deconstruction of traditional iconography and cosmology.

Moon is a gem, and it leaves me with some hope that there is further room for great films in visionary cinema. I look forward to Duncan Jones’ next one.