Moon: All By Myself

Speaking of loneliness, Moon is another movie about someone who feels alone and cut off from humanity. However, Sam Bell literally is all alone; he is the sole human employee at a lunar mining base, and his only companion is a robot named GERTY. The communication satellite is broken, and although he can send and receive recorded messages, he has not been in a live conversation with a human in about three years. In the film, scientists discovered an abundant source of energy on the moon's surface, and a corporation was formed to harvest the energy. In order to keep costs down, the lunar base only requires one employee, who is contracted for three years. My first thought was that, at the very least, the corporation should have two people so that isolation won't drive the employees absolutely insane. However, I had no idea what was in store.

The first part of the film examines Sam's growing mental instability as the result of isolation, but after an accident resulting from a hallucination, the movie takes a total left turn. As is the case in numerous science fiction films/television shows, Sam's employers aren't as benevolent/ambivolent/benign as they first appear, and their one-employee-cost-cutting scheme runs much deeper than Sam, and I, could have realized. The trailer was very obscure about the events of the last two thirds of the film, so read on from here at your own risk.

As it turns out, Sam isn't exactly who he thinks he is. He is a clone of Sam Bell, whose three years ended long ago (or maybe the original was never actually on the moon at all), and after the accident, another clone is awakened to replace the first Sam we meet. Every time a new clone is required, GERTY gets a new one from the clone bank (that isn't what they call it in the film, but I wasn't sure how else to refer to it) and tells him a story about an accident. Each Sam is imprinted with knowledge on how to operate the various parts of the base as well as memories from Sam's life. The communication satellite was deliberately deactivated to prevent the clones from knowing the truth, and they last about three years before deteriorating. Upon learning about this, I thought about the reason the company would do such a thing. As the second clone pointed out, this saves a fortune in recruiting and training, but how expensive is it to make a clone? How expensive is it to imprint the memories? If you think about it, the company sunk a lot of costs up front for very gradual long-term payoffs.

One thing that I enjoyed was that GERTY was not a complete HAL analogue (from 2001: A Space Odyssey). GERTY certainly acted at the company's behest, but it also aided Sam when he was trying to find confidential files about his past, and it revived a third clone in order to aid in the escape of one of the others. At first, I was disappointed because it looked like GERTY became self-aware or was able to act outside of its programming, but then I realized that it was programmed to help Sam and to "care" for him so that he would have some way to stave off isolation madness and the things he was doing weren't so outrageous (from GERTY's perspective) to set off alarm bells in GERTY's system.

The film ended with what I felt was a dig at the way different parts of the media choose to portray stories. It was very subtle, but the various reactions to Sam's return echoed MSNBC and FOX and their respective biases.

Up next: Sweet home Chicago...