So I have been having trouble lately finding things to blog about that aren’t mundane and boring. I also cant spend all day writing about the things I do at work, not enough time to write the posts… So I saw this great movie recently, Moon and I am going to write about that.

The movie revolves around the life of an Astronaut Sam Bell working on a Lunar mining facility. He signed a contract for a 3 year stint working mining H3 (Tritium/Hydrogen 3). This is the new fuel source of the future which powers the Fusion plants of the US and abroad. The movie spends all but the last 5-10 minutes centralized around 2 characters, Sam and the automated System GERTY (Kin of the HAL 9000 from 2001: space Odyssey). The glory of this movie is in its simplicity. There is no alien or supernatural phenomenon, the director is leading us through the last 2 weeks of Sam’s contract as he is introduced to a very awkward and perplexing situation.

!! – SPOILER ALERT – !!

After nearly 3 years of service and with the Telecoms satellites being down for the whole term, Sam begins to show signs of exhaustion and mental illness. He begins to see things, a woman that he doesn’t know. During the normal work duties, he has a accident and crashes his rover. As he is revived in the infirmary he is tested for mental problems and finished recovering and subsequently returns to his work duties soon after. In exploring the wreckage, he finds a man in the rover still. He finds another Sam Bell.

The movie attempts to keep the viewer in suspense of whether Sam is seeing him as a figment of his imagination or if Sam is really there. As the second Sam is revived by GERTY, they begin to talk to each other and GERTY avoids acknowledging there are two Sam’s. (Leading us to believe that there is in fact only one Sam). Both men have the same memories of the same wife and life at home, though each has a different way of expressing those but yet somewhat in a familiar way to each. Both Sam’s deduce that the other has to be a clone as they know that both are real and not a delusion. All the while GERTY is dutifully serving and attending to both Sam’s. The two Sam’s begin to explore their origins and find out what is really going on. In their quest, they find more evidence that there is more to this than a delusion of either of them. They find the source of the Communications outage and attempt to call to their wife Tess. Only to find out that the daughter they had known to be 5 was actually 15 years old, Tess had passed away and the real Sam was alive on Earth. During there exploration of the truth  the first Sam begins to show signs of illness, slowly and slowly getting sicker. The company dispatched a rescue team to save Sam and fix the harvester. As the clock ticks down to their arrival the men discover the source of the clones and location of  the past clones. We discover that the Sam’s have been cloned and only last about 3 years. When a Sam reaches the end of his 3 year term, unknowingly by him he is killed and replaced by another starting a fresh.

During their search GERTY is helping them, giving them codes to review video, allowing them to know the truth of their past.  We are left wondering, why GERTY would do this. Why would he willingly allow the clones to know what was going on? He believes that he is protecting them and equips the second Sam to escape before being harmed by the rescue team as he knows their intentions. The last 5 minutes shows us the first Sam having been put back in the rover, a third Sam in process of being awakened and the GERTY willingly allowing the Second Sam to clear his computer banks and prepare for the secret return trip back to earth. As a last minute sabotage, he programs one of the last two harvesters to ram one of the Signal blocking towers allowing the third Sam to have communications to earth and the secret is revealed to the American people.

All in all a pretty good sci fi flick. I greatly enjoyed Sam’s character as they interacted with each other. The movie doesn’t really attempt to explore the using of cloning whether good or bad, but takes the stand point that the method by which the company uses these people is evil, albeit understandable as far as a business decision. The movie wasn’t really exploring anything or if so not very deeply and it didn’t get any resolution. In the end it was just a good, well written and well acted Science Fiction movie that I will enjoy buying upon its release.

- Aaron Fraser