‘Moon’: a story on the wane

Washington Post

The future, as depicted in “Moon,” is familiar. Televisions are turned on and off by clapping. Sentient computers use emoticons to convey feeling. And big corporations cut corners at the expense of their employees.

This is the reality of Sam Bell, an employee of Lunar Industries Ltd., which has stationed him on the moon to oversee the mining of clean energy from moon rocks. He has been there for three years, beaming power back to Earth.

There are only two weeks before Sam’s contract is up. Only two weeks before he gets to see his wife and child. Then he finds something on the surface of the moon that throws everything into doubt — including, tragically, the film’s logic.

“Moon,” a moody sci-fi morsel, has the right look, the right sound and the right feel. Actor Sam Rockwell, as Sam, has the aw-shucks charisma to carry a movie on his own.

But storywise, “Moon” fails to live up to the promise of its premise.

It’s impossible to write about its failures without revealing more of the plot, so let’s start with a twist that has been exposed in the trailer: Sam’s discovery on the lunar surface is a doppelganger of himself, unconscious in the wreckage of a vehicle crash from which he himself had previously escaped (or did he?).

Suddenly, after an epoch of loneliness, Sam has company. And it’s himself.

Watching Rockwell share scenes with himself is a pleasure, and that’s almost enough to compensate for the film’s diminishing returns.

Screenwriter Nathan Parker’s explanation for Sam’s doppelganger is too mundane, doesn’t entirely make sense and comes too quickly. It sucks the wind out of the movie.

The explanation for the film’s central mystery narrows its scope significantly.

What could have been an intimate, industrial companion to the pristine, astro-existential epics of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky — Who are we? What is real? What do science and the cosmos have to do with it? — is instead an all-too-literal drama about the worst job in the solar system.

“Moon,” rated R, is 97 minutes long. It is playing in selected theaters.