Moon (2009)

Drama, Sci-Fi

Director: Duncan Jones
Writers: Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw

"250,000 miles from home, the hardest thing to face...is yourself"

Moon, the feature debut of Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) is another confirmation that the science-fiction genre is still able to get out of the doldrums in which visual effects rule the game.

Filmed in 33 days and with a budget of $5 million, the movie revolves around a single character, a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of his three-year contract as an astronaut miner on the far side of the Moon. All this time, his home has been Selene, a moon base where he lived alone with a robot companion named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), taking care of the extraction of Helium 3 a precious gas that can solve the energy problem on Earth.

With two weeks to go, all he dreams about is to return home, to his wife and child. The health of Sam begins to deteriorate, leading him to have strange hallucinations, to suffer from severe headaches and failing to maintain an appropriate level of concentration, thus causing a serious accident.

Plot summary from IMDb: Sam Bell has a three year contract to work for Lunar Industries. For the contract's entire duration, he is the sole employee based at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth, so his only direct real-time interaction is with GERTY, the intelligent computer whose function is to attend to his day to day needs. With such little human contact and all of it indirect, he feels that three years is far too long to be so isolated; he knows he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess and their infant daughter Eve, who was born just prior to his leaving for this job. With two weeks to go, he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured, he awakens back at the station in the infirmary, he assumes assisted by GERTY. GERTY tells him that a rescue team named Eliza will come to the station to clean up the aftermath of the accident. After his recuperation, he takes an unauthorized trip back to the broken harvester, where he makes an unexpected discovery. Because of his find, he begins to doubt his sanity, then his true identity, then the company and GERTY's willingness to do what is best for him. Because of his resulting beliefs, his sole mission becomes how to get back to Earth on his own.

Awards: Won 1 BAFTA Film Award. Another 21 wins & 26 nominations.
Runtime: 97 min
R