Celebrating Great Films


Monday, July 20, 2009

Moon

MoonUnranked at time of writing.

It's a conspiracy! This film has been voted for by enough people, who have rated it high enough, yet it's not on IMDb's Top 250!

It easily deserves to be. It's a quiet, creepy and wonderful character-based science fiction yarn. No alien invasions nor CGI explosions, just a lonely man working out his time on a lunar mining base.

Directed by Duncan Jones, aka Zowie Bowie, and featuring a tour-de-force performance by Sam Rockwell, this wonderful story manages to pay homage to a golden age of celluloid sci-fi (think 2001, Silent Running, Alien, Outland...), and yet still be totally original. It brings the old tropes right up to date.

Moon was screened at NASA's Space Center Houston at the request of a professor there, as part of a lecture series. Softcore punk porn site SuicideGirls interviewed Duncan Jones about it:

"He'd been reading online that we'd done this film about Helium-3 mining and that's something that people at NASA are working on," said Jones. "We did a Q&A afterward. They asked me why the base looked so sturdy, like a bunker, and not like the kind of stuff they are designing that they are going to transport with them. I said 'Well, in the future I assume you won't want to continue carrying everything with you, you'll want to use the resources on the moon to build things' and a woman in the audience raised her hand and said, 'I'm actually working on something called Mooncrete, which is concrete that mixes lunar regolith and ice water from the moon's polar caps.'"

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