Moon
Moon is a return to form, not for its 1st time director, Duncan Jones or even for its central star, Sam Rockwell, but for the very genre that the film encapsulates. Moon is a return to form for science fiction. A looking-glass on the human condition, long over due for a bit of spit and polish.
At the peak of the 1960s science fiction was more than a genre. It embodied the schizophrenic character of the time. In one camp, authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were claiming a new era of human evolution was upon us. Man would finally walk on the moon, and not long after conscious, loving robots and hyper-intelligent human creatures would stand above the utopia of Earth, hand in semi-autonomous metallic hand. In the other camp, more concerned with the war in Vietnam and the continued subjugation of the common, working man, were writers like Philip K. Dick. His work was pulp bound and sold for a few cents, but in it Dick managed to enable a darker aspect of the human condition, one more capable of seeing the machine of the cold, harsh universe for what it was: impossible to comprehend, let alone to conquer.
And so the 1960s passed by, and with it the long-held notion that in technology our saviour would be found. Science fiction either gave way to fantasy, in films like Star Wars, or founded itself in action packed battles to the death with the mechanic scourge of films like Terminator.
Moon has been hailed as a return to the golden days of science fiction, not least because of its homage to movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moon is rooted in the optimistic view of the future, one where the people of Earth can literally look up in the night sky and see the source of all the clean, green energy they can imagine. But Moon is also a film about the common man, alá Philip K. Dick, about the isolation that technology brings and the hopes it dashes, even as it makes our lives seem ever closer to utopian. And Moon takes film-making back to the days of scale-models tottering about on perfect sets designed to relegate the razzmatazz of Hollywood CGI. Why, even the Hydrogen-rich dust of the Moon’s surface twinkles like the particles that flew up from Tracey Island whenever the Thunderbirds were called into action.
More than that I will not say about the film. You should go and see it, ponder the plight of mankind and wonder – oh did you ever stop? – where the human being ends and the vast universe begins.