Moon - Directed by Ducan Jones and starring Sam Rockwell

Awesome movie. I had everything figured out down to details by the end of the first act....but the film revealed the details I had figured out already pretty soon after that and then let us sit with them and enjoy the film...rather than doing a slow reveal. Good stuff.

I really enjoyed both the technical (motion-control composites, doubles, etc) and artistic (good acting) aspects of how the Sams interacted.
 
Ben_B said:
Awesome movie. I had everything figured out down to details by the end of the first act....but the film revealed the details I had figured out already pretty soon after that and then let us sit with them and enjoy the film...rather than doing a slow reveal. Good stuff.

I really enjoyed both the technical (motion-control composites, doubles, etc) and artistic (good acting) aspects of how the Sams interacted.
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Pretty much sums up my impression of Moon.

I also liked the fact that it echoed and made nods to everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Silent Running to Outland. Also, miniatures worked great for this film and show that Hollywood has really abandoned this awesome FX craft way too early for an unhealthy addiction to digital effects and 3D animation.

Also, some of the production designs reminded me not only of classic sci-fi films of the 70's and 80's, but of the designs in the cinematic role playing video game Mass Effect, which is slated to get a live action film adaptation in the coming years. If you're not familiar with Mass Effect (it costs only 20 bucks new for the XB360), it is a space opera that has designs and alien creatures that wouldn't feel out of place in Star Trek, but yet still retains its own feel and style that feels iconic in its own way. I think Duncan Jones would be the perfect director for a Mass Effect film if he were given the job.

Moon, along with Terminator Salvation, was easily my favorite film of the summer so far. Quality-wise, this 5 million dollar budget sci-fi drama completely out shined the 200 million Transformers and the 150 million dollar budgeted Star Trek. Also, seeing how good Moon was for how little it cost in filmmaking dollars makes me feel more confident about tackling my own sci-fi and fantasy ideas on a non-Hollywood budget.
 
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I saw this movie last weekend and man, it blew my mind. I might be biased because I love sci fi but I think this is the best movie I've seen all year. Better than 500 Days of Summer.
 
saw this yesterday, like it till it decided to be about

spoiler....




clones.










then it felt conventional.
 
I don't know...

->spoiler follows<-








...has the story of an isolated man under the control of distant masters discovering his true nature and the nature of his predicament, then allying with his fellow clones to provide for escape really been done often enough, to call it 'conventional...?'
 
i felt like it was scripted in to quick, no true revelation other than he's not suppose to come down. and the ending is abrupt i felt like.
 
spidey said:
saw this yesterday, like it till it decided to be about

spoiler....




clones.










then it felt conventional.
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Now see, I thought it was going conventional when it seemed like a movie about a man who had been alone for too long and was beginning to lose his mind.

The CLONE aspect was interesting because once it was revealed it wasn't a done deal. You still had to wonder, "wait, is that really his clone or is he going nuts?"
 
A few moments could have been the starting point for generic hollywood plot:
-sam trying to "uncover the clone conspiracy"
-sam trying to accept the facts and creating a huge drama without advancing the plot
-evil robot
-mercenaries arriving on a mission to kill

It was refreshing to see the director/writer consistently avoid each of these cliche traps.

They also let the protagonist behave as smart as possible.
The generic hero in hollywood movies is extremely slow. For example Neo in Matrix. Everybody on the right side of the IQ bell curve usually has figured out the meaning of the dialogue heavy filler-scenes in a matter of seconds and goes into mental stand-by mode until there's some action again. No such moments in Moon.

I always kept guessing how the movie would end, there were so many variables that you could speculate on. At the same time there were a couple of very emotional moments. Rockwell should get at least an oscar nomination.

My favourite movie of the year together with District 9 and In the Loop.
 
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT


Just streamed it on netflix.

WHY clones?

What am I missing?

Really? - It's cheaper to have 100 clones in a basement with memory implants and a charade of video emails than it would be to pay 1 real person 1 million dollars a year and then replace them every three years? Let alone pay someone 500K a year, 250K a year, etc.

Imagine the equivalent of 1 million of todays dollars per year as part of the cost of powering 70% of the planet. That's nothing.

But really - genetically copying this guy 100X's and growing him to the same age, powering all the units to store him and wake him up and run everything is cheaper / better / more efficient than training 1 person every 3 years and paying them handsomely?

Loved the execution, plotting, acting. BUT the central premise - 100 memory chip implanted clones in a basement is more efficient and cost effective than just training a person and paying them to work their every three years makes no sense / or it wasn't sold well in the move.

The company didn't seem to blink at sending a 3 person rescue team and it was never mentioned anywhere that sending a shuttle to the moon every three years would be exorbitantly expensive (unless I missed it) and that would be a very big blank for me to have to fill in.

Why clones?
 
Jack Daniel Stanley said:
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT


Just streamed it on netflix.

WHY clones?

What am I missing?

Really? - It's cheaper to have 100 clones in a basement with memory implants and a charade of video emails than it would be to pay 1 real person 1 million dollars a year and then replace them every three years? Let alone pay someone 500K a year, 250K a year, etc.

Imagine the equivalent of 1 million of todays dollars per year as part of the cost of powering 70% of the planet. That's nothing.

But really - genetically copying this guy 100X's and growing him to the same age, powering all the units to store him and wake him up and run everything is cheaper / better / more efficient than training 1 person every 3 years and paying them handsomely?

Loved the execution, plotting, acting. BUT the central premise - 100 memory chip implanted clones in a basement is more efficient and cost effective than just training a person and paying them to work their every three years makes no sense / or it wasn't sold well in the move.

The company didn't seem to blink at sending a 3 person rescue team and it was never mentioned anywhere that sending a shuttle to the moon every three years would be exorbitantly expensive (unless I missed it) and that would be a very big blank for me to have to fill in.

Why clones?
Click to expand...

if you factor in things like injuries, mental stability and other health problems, i'd imagine you'd hafta have a fairly sizable crew on hand in standby for any problems that may arise.
70 percent of power needs is alot to leave hanging should something go wrong with one person. factor in the time it would take to train people not to mention finding people with the right mental state to function effectively in that kinda enviroment and pay them to be on standby for years before they actually go up and suddenly the clones start to look more feasible.
there would also be an age issue.
suppose they train 5 people for stand by and plan to send them one after the other, the last man on the totem pole will be on standby for 15 years.
besides at this point who knows how cheaply clones may be produced,
the company may be the ones who developed it thereby making it far more affordable than paying a large crew, health care, the possibility of lawsuits and everything else that goes with employment in a high risk field.
then again if they didn't have clones it would've been a pretty boring movie:)
 
Loved the execution, plotting, acting. BUT the central premise - 100 memory chip implanted clones in a basement is more efficient and cost effective than just training a person and paying them to work their every three years makes no sense / or it wasn't sold well in the move.
Click to expand...

First of all, movie itself never had such a claim.(efficiency or cost effectiveness)
If I were to prove you economically that it is indeed feasible, or an inserted scene showing few executives explaining how using clones are more beneficial would it add anything to its value? -which is to question ethics of cloning-

Why clones?
Click to expand...
So the simple answer would be 'Why not?' or as they say in 101 philosophy classes: 'Because.'

Note:All in all this movie and "in the Loop" only 2 movies made in 2009(of which I've seen) worth mentioning.
 
JDS, thats how i felt. i guess in the future spaceship still cost almost a billion dollars so i guess thats what there thought process would be its cheaper to leave him out there than send a another guy.
 
lowercase said:
...
then again if they didn't have clones it would've been a pretty boring movie:)
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That's kind of my point. The reason they used clones is because they used clones.
or
So it could be a cool thriller where a guy finds his own dead body.
VGurcu said:
First of all, movie itself never had such a claim.(efficiency or cost effectiveness)
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Yeah it did. They claimed it was cheaper than training someone new every three years. Which is a a pretty stupid claim whatever the technology.

Also even if they didn't claim that - the movie presents a realistic universe. People have injuries, psychology. It's not Batman. No one falls off a 10 story building and lands on an awning and walks away. There's supposed to be some logic here. So it sets up a universe where things are supposed to make sense. Like a company does something because it's the cheapest most efficient way. Why else would they go around with this smoke and mirrors of manipulated video emails and such? Because it's cool?

VGurcu said:
If I were to prove you economically that it is indeed feasible, or an inserted scene showing few executives explaining how using clones are more beneficial would it add anything to its value? -which is to question ethics of cloning-
Click to expand...
Maybe. But the scene was already there. The newer clone says to the other clone - "think about it, the cost of having to train someone new every three years..." Really 100 clones in a basement is a better more plausible business decision than training people to work there? How about
"think about it the cost of having to train someone new every three years, the hundreds of millions of dollars it'd cost every time they flew the new guy in."

VGurcu said:
So the simple answer would be 'Why not?' or as they say in 101 philosophy classes: 'Because.'...
Click to expand...
That's the worst reason in this instance. Sometimes it's OK. Watching a lot of Demon Baby movies since I'm writing one. In GRACE the baby comes back to life after it's still born and needs blood, "just because". You could imply that it's a zombie baby of some sort. And the kind of implied reason is that it comes back to life because the mother loved it so much, and it's cool that it's left implied and unexplained. No - she was exposed to radiation or anything. But THE POINT is that it's an unfathomable mystery. In Jan Svankmeyer's LITTLE OTIK, a father carves a stump and roots into the shape of a baby for his grieving wife who can't have a baby. When she pretends to go into labor and delliver it, it comes to life, eats everyone, and grows to gigantic proportions. It's never explained why, but that's OK because this is a fairy tale and a surrealist world.

But when you set up a realistic CAUSE AND EFFECT universe "just because" is utter bullshi* and not an option for anyone serious about telling stories.

Dramatic effect derives from what is probable. Not what is possible. - Aristotle.

In other words - iron out any plausibility issues in your script or risk losing your audience. You need a probable and understandable solution rather than expecting the audience to throw darts at anything on an infinite spectrum of possibility dart board. Well it could be because there's a wizard that lives on the moon and shi*s out two Sam Rockwells every morning.

Plus ... while I just gave two examples of Magical Realism and Fairy Tale. Moon is a thriller. A thriller. Lack of plausibility is the cardinal sin of a thriller.

The cardinal sin:
http://snarksscriptnuggets.blogspot.com/2010/01/todays-nugget-plausibility-is-key-to.html
Suspension of disbelief is to swallow the fact that people can fly, for made up things like warp drive, to over look substandard effects, or to give Star TRek some grace when Kirk lands on a planet .. A PLANET and happens to land 200 yards from Old Spocks cave. Not for the central premise of a thing.

spidey said:
JDS, thats how i felt. i guess in the future spaceship still cost almost a billion dollars so i guess thats what there thought process would be its cheaper to leave him out there than send a another guy.
Click to expand...

Yeah right now it's 500 million to a billion $ for any kind of space mission.

I guess it would be possible to make 100 clones for a total of a billion dollars and man your mining station for three hundred years. But when the 2nd clone is making the case he could have had three more lines.

As I mentioned above - plausibility is key to the thriller - when my wife and I were watching this last night we both had the same sensation about 2/3rds through ... OK now we're going to learn what's really going on here. I hope there's a really good reason to have clones in this other than facilitating the gag of finding your double and learning your a clone - maybe it is just cheaper - maybe it's really an experiment in cloning glommed on to the mining job.

But all the rouse the company had to go through reminded me of Slashers in horror films going into the bedroom first, positioning the cat to spring out of the closet then hiding behind the curtains, then waiting for the victim to come in, be scared by the cat, then relax before they jump out from the curtains and stab them (as the old joke goes - this is what Jason or Michael Meyers is doing when they're off camera).

Still it mostly worked for me. I'm just surprised by the lack of reaction to the lack of attention they payed to this and more so by the fact that it didn't bother anyone else.

If the whole thing were much more vague and we weren't even sure why he was out there or what they were mining. Then yeah maybe. Leave the central contrivance of your world unaddressed.

But here's the big misstep if you are not going to explain the CENTRAL PREMISE that makes your thriller work - don't go to the trouble of explaining all that crap about mining the moon and stuff. You then set up an expectation that it's a well thought out, realistic world that we should understand.
 
Sometimes the story is more about the predicament and the characters' responses to it, than the cause of the predicament itself.

I didn't see any underpinning logic to the rationale behind clones etc either, but since I was engaging with the movie on an entirely different sort of wavelength, that lack didn't (and doesn't) bother me. Having read your excellent post above, I suspect that maybe the characters in Moon *are* stuck in a surreal or fairy-tale sort of text: There once was a man in the moon... and instead of magic and fairies it's high technology and clones, to tell a still fairy-tale-esque story about death and cruelty and greed.
 
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Sad Max said:
Sometimes the story is more about the predicament and the characters' responses to it, than the cause of the predicament, itself.

I didn't see any underpinning logic to the rationale behind clones etc either, but since I was engaging with the movie on an entirely different sort of wavelength, that lack didn't (and doesn't) bother me. Having read your excellent post above, I suspect that maybe the characters in Moon *are* stuck in a surreal or fairy-tale sort of text: There once was a man in the moon... and instead of magic and fairies it's high technology and clones, to tell a still fairy-tale-esque story about death and cruelty and greed.
Click to expand...

True, true the central predicament is about how they get out of this gauntlet. And the plausibility issue with thrillers has more to do with coincidences etc. But still this is a puzzle movie - it's a mystery. Part of the fun and engagement is "what's going on?" Unfortunately the answer to exactly what is going on is only semi-baked.

Being too good at arguing makes me sounded like I hated the movie. I just am surprised that no one else hiccuped on it this and have to go too far to explain my qualms, etc. If the film didn't attempt to enumerate its own world so clearly though ... explanation of the Moon mining at the top - Senate testimony at the end - I would maybe have never worried about it. But the movie told me it was something I could understand and was logic based. That set up an expectation that it didn't meet.

Basically it took my entertainment value of the movie from a 90% down to 70% because part of the point, of their reaction to it as you put it, is for protags and audience alike to figure out what is going on, and because the movie set up an expectation of expositive clarity.

Direction, acting, pacing, cutting, mood, feel, art direction (though I can see your point about it being derivative), Rockwell's performances, makeup (really like the way he looked stale and fresh) = all good. Just the one script issue hindered my enjoyment.
 
What I didnt get at the end was (and I may be just a dumb limey) but did the orignal Sam Bell know he had been cloned? Why did they have clones? To save money? I just didn't understand the movie that well, and I'm not normally this stupid. I got the fact it was all supposed to be a secret but.......yeh. I'm dissapointed with myself, really, I am.

Edit-Ahh, think I understand it a bit now after reading comments here. Still....the movie is confusing. What would have even better is if the real Sam Bell died but was cloned, and one of the clones finds out the truth and escapes to tell his family and the world that NASA are evil or something lol.
 
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Also, in the whole of his nearly 3 years, he had NEVER ventured out in his space mobile to check stuff out? I mean, those beacons werent exactly very far away were they? And surely tall enough to see from a distance?
 
LMAO, someone off IMDB reckons Moon should of been called Room as he/she reckons it was shot entirely in a room, this true?
 
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