Congratulations to Duncan and the MOON team. Simply outstanding.

Justice is served

There’s a grassroots campaign underway to get Sam Rockwell an Oscar nomination for his role as Sam Bell in Moon.

It’s been a good long while since I considered the Academy Awards important, but I do believe that I didn’t see another actor come anywhere close to Rockwell’s performance this year. It’s a measure of his craft in Moon that you forget this is basically a one-man show, but it’s also a drawback in terms of Oscar because it tends to be the more showy performances that get the Academy’s attention. And yet, watching the film again with the commentaries and some of the behind-the-scenes footage you realise just how technically perfect Rockwell is.

I was intrigued to hear about how some of the more complicated shots were achieved and its always a pleasant surprise when a movie manages to trick your eye and brain. Where most movies batter the audience in special effects at their cost, Moon has a remarkable number of effects that don’t pull you out of the film. I’d love to force the likes of Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay and James Cameron to watch this movie and then try to justify their ridiculous budgets.

It was a surprise to learn how much of the more complex Sam Bell shots relied on Rockwell nailing and balancing the performances, memorising cues and eye lines and consistently carrying the story almost solo. That alone should be enough for the nomination. That he creates characters that get under your skin and have you thinking of them long after the film finishes is probably wasted on those who make the Oscar decisions.

It’s worth mentioning that this is the same guy who could have just gone off to work with a more established director or make another movie with George Clooney. Small gold statuette or not he deserves kudos for taking a gamble on Moon and giving us something very special.

ps The Moon official website just launched.

Here be spoilers. Go buy MOON on Blu-ray before you read another word.

The greater good in film tends to require sacrifice. It’s why MacReady sits in the snow waiting to see what happens. It’s why Freeman dies never knowing if anyone found the note in the bottle that he threw into the sea. Sometimes this final selfless act is rewarded. The best and most recent example being a garbage collector, who in a wonderful example of screenwriting not only comes back from the dead, but in doing so reveals he’s a lot more than the sum of his parts. Turns out the little fucker has a soul*.

Which brings us neatly enough to Sam Bell and probably the most human story I’ve ever seen in hard science fiction.

There is a greater good in Moon, but Bell doesn’t sacrifice himself for it. He’s betrayed for it.

For the first clone we meet the revelation comes too late and that’s the scene that kills me. It’s also where I believe Moon is pushed from a merely excellent film to a perfect one. Sam’s already in denial about what’s going on – even when confronted with himself in the form of the second Sam**. By the time he’s got a handle on the truth he’s falling apart. And then, and this is when Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker really turn the screws on the character and the audience, Sam phones home.

We’ve had characters discover they’ve been living a lie before – it’s a reliable staple in science fiction for a reason – but this is the only time I’ve seen someone put in such a corner. Death is bad enough, but the poor bastard just had his life taken away as well.

He never had a chance. He breaks down, wants to go home, and if you’re like me you break down right along with him.

And that’s why the script is smart enough to throw away the revelation of the clones at the close of the first act, when less confident writers would have tried to reveal it much later. The movie brilliantly plays with the audience’s expectations through GERTY’s programming, and sets new standards of visual effects when Sam interacts with himself, while reveling in old school minature and model work elsewhere. Once the baton is passed to the second Sam, we’re back in the fight that both O’Niel and Ripley faced in Outland and Alien and we’re very much rooting for the underdog. That the bastards also managed to squeeze in a visual reference to Tron that I missed on the first five or six viewings is just icing on the cake.

But the first Sam still dies.

This is some sophisticated science fiction. It wears its influences on its sleeve, but never takes the lazy route of homage most movies do. Instead it prefers to go all out and risk everything on sharing that very special space that earlier movies carved out for themselves.

When you take into account Sam Rockwell’s performance, Clint Mansell’s score and the fact that the whole shebang cost only $5million(!) I’ll go as far as saying that Moon is the first truly important science fiction movie of the 21st century.

Fuck it. I’ll go further. Moon is better than 2001: A Space Odyssey by a country mile.

*If you’ve been following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter you’ll know how easy souls are to project

**one thing we learn in the director’s commentary is that Sam 1 and Sam 2 are actually Sam 5 and Sam 6