Moon: The Lonely Life of a Man on the Moon - Reactor

Moon (2009) Directed by Duncan Jones. Written by Nathan Parker. Starring Sam Rockwell.

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I think there is often a feeling among science fiction fans that as science and technology progress more and more, it can become harder to suspend our disbelief about what we see in fiction. It shouldn’t really matter, because science fiction is fiction. It’s not prognostication, it’s not prediction, and it does not have to represent what is possible or even plausible, in spite of what the internet’s most insistent pedants claim.

Even so, we can’t help but compare what we see in fiction to how the world is changing around us, and we notice when things don’t match up.

Which is why I am happy to report that I’ve discovered a small benefit to watching sci fi films in the year of our endless fuckery 2026, and that’s the fact that I never have to suspend my disbelief anymore about the great and terrible lengths corporations will go to exploit human suffering for profit. Reality has proved there is no limit. You can put any level or variety of greedy corporate malfeasance on my screen and I’ll just nod and think, yeah, sure, somewhere there’s a tech CEO coke-ranting how to make this happen right now, and he is getting paid more for it per hour than I’ve earned in my entire life.

The Moon in fiction has long been a useful place for us to put ideas we want to contemplate: utopian ideals, dystopian satires, national pride, human curiosity, capitalist greed. Duncan Jones’ Moon adds the existential anxiety of a lowly guy with a boring job to that list, which feels like the natural progression of Moon themes.

Moon was the brainchild of Jones and production designer Gavin Rothery, who spent ten years living and working together as they developed the idea. Jones came up with the story, which was then turned into a screenplay by Nathan Parker, while Rothery designed the Moon base that serves as the film’s setting.

The limitations and isolation of the location is fundamental to the film; it was part of the concept from the start. Jones has said he specifically set out to make a movie in the tradition of, and for fans of, films like Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and Peter Hyams’ Outland (1981). It’s easy to see how those inspirations combine in Moon, which mixes the solitude and isolation of Silent Running with the profit-hunting corporate structure of Alien and Outland. There’s a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in there as well, particularly with the design and demeanor of the station’s computer GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey in an obvious homage to Douglas Rain’s voice for HAL 9000.

That setting is nearly all practical effects, with CGI enhancement being added to models and miniatures after filming, mostly in the form of the lunar landscape. I think it shows in a few places, but I really don’t mind. They were doing a lot with a limited (by sci fi movie standards) budget.

Rothery has explained that it was much cheaper to do the effects the old-fashioned way. I think that’s not normally what people assume about the choice between practical and computer visual effects in modern films, but I suspect that might be a matter of scale. Rothery said, “Just to give you an idea of that, the whole budget for Moon ended up being just under two and a half million pounds, the cheapest quote we got for the effects was nine and a half million pounds, just for the effects.” It’s easy to see how that number would be insignificant for a big, studio-backed franchise, but prohibitive for a small film from first-time filmmakers.

I always like practical effects, and I like how Moon created the feeling of an enclosed, isolated lunar base by building, well, an enclosed, isolated set. The interior of the Moon base is a complete set built at Shepperton Studios in the United Kingdom. That includes the ceiling tracks on which the robot caretaker GERTY travels. The base exteriors, the mining machines, and the Moon rovers are all inexpensive miniatures.

As well as going for the cheaper option, they used what they could get their hands on. According to one article, some of the miniatures are made from recycled parts from abandoned Red Dwarf props. They also brought in the right experts to help, including prop designer and model maker Bill Pearson; we’ve seen his work before in Alien and Outland.

I do love fun facts from tales of movie model-making, and my favorite fun fact this time is about how they needed a material to serve as the lunar surface for the miniature ore processors and rovers to drive across. Cement is the right color gray, but it’s not particularly healthy to use on a film set in large quantities, so safety overseers nixed that idea. Instead, Pearson and his crew ended up buying a bunch of cat litter at Sainsbury’s and mixing it with powdered black and white paint to achieve the right color.

Now, if you’re thinking, “That doesn’t sound much healthier than cement dust,” you would be right! It’s not! Inhaling both cat litter and paint is very bad for you. But I guess the health and safety people didn’t object, so that’s what they went with. It was the perfect color and texture visually… right up until the miniatures began kicking up fine dust that hung in the air during filming. The Moon, alas, has no air, so they sprayed down the fake lunar surface.

And now you’re thinking, “Wait, they sprayed down cat litter? Doesn’t that make muddy clumps?” Yes, it does. The Moon (as we discussed when watching Destination Moon [1950]), does not have mud. But apparently the cat litter clumping looked good on camera, so they went with it.

This is why I hope filmmakers never let the craftsmanship required for practical effects die out. Not everybody has nine million pounds to pay a VFX company, but anybody can do some messy experiments with cat litter to achieve the visual impact they want.

As Moon begins, we meet Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), the lone occupant base on the far side of the Moon. He works for a company called Lunar Industries, which is mining helium-3 to fuel fusion power plants back on Earth. Sam is coming to the end of his three-year contract, and he’s eager to get back home to his wife (Dominique McElligott) and young daughter (Rosie Shaw as a child, later Kaya Scodelario as a teenager). He’s completely isolated, because the satellite that would allow for real-time radio contact with Earth is broken, and the Earth-bound executives (played by Benedict Wong and Matt Berry) make no promises about when it might be fixed.

I know these days many people know Matt Berry from What We Do in the Shadows, but in my heart he will always be Dr. Lucien Sanchez from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Imagine you’re stuck alone on the Moon with only corporate messages from Dr. Sanchez to keep you company. It’s no wonder Sam starts hallucinating. Thankfully none of the hallucinations involve giant eyeball mpreg or cosmic broccoli.

One of these hallucinations strikes when he’s out on the lunar surface with one of the ore processing machines. He gets into an accident, then apparently wakes up in the base infirmary with GERTY watching over him and no idea how he got back. The ore processor is still down, and after fairly easily tricking GERTY into letting him leave the base, Sam drives out to investigate the site of his accident.

That’s when he learns, and we learn, that it wasn’t his accident. One version of Sam is still in the vehicle, and he’s not quite dead. The second version of Sam brings him back to the base. They both freak out, but in an amusingly low-key kind of way. What would you do if you found yourself in a crashed vehicle? That is not a situation covered in established social etiquette guidelines! I love the way it plays out here, with the men alternating between warily approaching each other and feebly pretending everything is normal. Rockwell is of course great, but he’s Sam Rockwell. He’s always great.

Both versions of Sam realize more or less immediately that there is some cloning involved. One of them must be a clone, or both of them. They come to accept that, and the rest of the film carries on.

I didn’t know about that plot element when I first saw this movie, which was several years after its release. Upon rewatching I realized I had not remembered correctly how early the existence of the clones is revealed. It’s cleared up pretty early in the film, not a secret the movie dances around until late in the game, and I think the story is all the better for it. It’s also pretty clear, from press and interviews around the film’s release, that Jones never thought of it as a great big spoiler that needed to be kept secret; he told every interviewer who asked about how Rockwell played more than one role. (Robin Chalk is the body double in many scenes.)

It’s a refreshing approach in this era of film spoiler paranoia (where sometimes even the actors don’t know the full story during production), but more than that, it also provides insight into what kind of story this is. This is not a big story. The world is not in danger. There is no specific villain to defeat. It’s a survival story, but it’s only about the survival of a couple of guys (who are the same guy), not a larger population that needs to be protected. So the science fictional twist isn’t the point. The emotional impact is.

The intimacy of that scale leaves a lot of room to explore emotional questions: What would you think of yourself if you met as strangers? How are our choices shaped by our memories and our experiences? What can we trust about our perception of ourselves and our lives? How much of what we yearn for is shaped be the limitations of our environment? What does death mean when you exist in multiple versions?

None of these questions are posed because the film wants to provide definitive answers. It’s not as though the two Sams sit down and have long, philosophical conversations about their memories and (brief) lived experience. They’re wary of each other, curious about each other, and frustrated with each other. Most of all, they share the same anger upon realizing how disposable they are to their employer.

The first Sam is getting very sick. It’s never exactly named, but there seems to be accumulated radiation damage in the clones toward the end of their three years. The Sams realize they are never meant to go home. All the previous clones have tucked themselves unknowingly into the “travel pod,” closed their eyes, and been turned to ash. It’s not entirely clear how long this has been going on, because the clones’ memories are obviously somebody else’s lived experience, but the age of Sam’s daughter on Earth suggests it’s something like fifteen years.

I like Moon in the same way I like my favorite sci fi short stories. I don’t always want the sweeping, high-stakes approach to sci fi. Sometimes what I want is for a story to propose a disturbing scenario and sit with the implications.

There is no in-universe explanation for the science behind the cloning of either bodies or consciousness. It’s simply never discussed, which is fine by me. Not knowing what consciousness is or how consciousness works (we don’t know), nor whether it can ever be replicated (we don’t know that either), just means it’s fertile ground for sci fi writers. It’s depressingly easy to imagine that if we ever do figure out how to create living, conscious beings, the first thing we’ll do is figure out a way to exploit them, to make them disposable. What would that look like? What would that feel like? What responsibilities would we have toward those entities? What would we think about them?

And what would they think about us?

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What do you think of Moon? How would you react if you met your clone?

I’m going to be traveling throughout April, so the Science Fiction Film Club is taking a bit of a break. We’ll be back in May, and we’re going to be beaming directly into your brains…

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Your Mind Is Not Your Own

Science fiction loves mucking around in the human mind, so let’s watch some movies about people making extremely questionable choices in the realms of speculative psychology and neuroscience. There are a lot of films that fit into this broad category, so I have to save a few obvious ones for the future. (Including the obvious choices of Strange Days and Brainstorm… There are so many. This might turn into a two-month collection.)

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