Mark Tille/Lunar Industries
It's lonely at the top: Astronaut Sam (Sam Rockwell) works the dark side of the moon.
Duncan Jones, who conceived and directed the lunar suspense film, "Moon," is the son of David Bowie and the former "space rocker's" ex-wife, Angela Bowie. For much of his life, Jones was known as "Zowie Bowie," but when he reached adulthood, he decided to use a more conservative version of his given name. (He was born Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones.)
Mark Tille/Lunar Industries
It's lonely at the top: Astronaut Sam (Sam Rockwell) works the dark side of the moon.
"Moon" is similarly unflashy -- a throwback to the relatively thoughtful, adult-oriented science- fiction films that briefly were in vogue in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Bowie was recording his spaceman-in-a-strange-land songs and starring as an alien in "The Man Who Fell to Earth." "Moon" evokes something of the lonely desperation of Bowie's signature hit, "Space Oddity," and the film's hero, Sam Bell, could be a spiritual cousin to Bowie's Major Tom.
Sam Rockwell -- indie cinema's go-to guy when you need a likable yet damaged oddball -- stars as, yes, Sam, a contract astronaut nearing the end of a three-year solo job on the desolate dark side of moon, where he has been in charge of a commercial base mining the isotope helium-3, a clean-burning fuel that has ended Earth's energy crisis.
Because of a broken satellite, Sam is able to communicate with his wife (Dominique McElligott), his young daughter and his bosses only through transmissions that take many days to reach their targets. "Three years is a long haul," Sam confides to the computer program Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), the HAL 9000 of his lunar base. "It's way, way, way, way, way too long."
Sam is counting down the last two weeks before his return to Earth when an injury forces him to confront himself in a way few people ever will experience -- to literally confront himself, as a doppelgänger, a double. Is this second Sam a clone or a delusion?
"Moon" remains, basically, a one-man movie, but sometimes we see more than one version of the same man on the screen. The premise is at once existential and scientific, and may remind genre aficionados of certain "Twilight Zone" episodes and the 1969 film, "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun."
Like the lunar surface, "Moon" -- scripted by Nathan Parker from Jones' story -- is somewhat cold and remote; it's easier to admire the movie's convincing production design and beautifully crafted, frequently old-school miniatures and special effects than to care about the hero's dilemma (even though it becomes symbolic of the aging process that affects us all). Still, a film that wants to appeal to the intellect and not just the emotions is almost a novelty, especially in a movie-going culture that prefers its space hardware to transform and destroy aircraft carriers. "Moon" suggests Jones will be a filmmaker worth following.
"Moon" is playing exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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