Article from Entertainment weekly
MOON
starring Sam Rockwell
Directed by Duncan Jones
R, 97 minutes
By Owen Gleiberman
In the brooding science-fiction trifle Moon, Sam Rockwell plays a solitary corporate astronaut who is finishing three lonely years on the dark side of the lunar surface. His name is Sam Bell and his job is to oversee the mining of helium-3, which has become Earths primary source of energy. In a dankly gritty geodesic space station, which might just as well be a prison, Sam has no one to talk to but a computer named Gerty an amusing satirical hamge to HAL in 2001, with a voice all playful self-pity, provided by Kevin Spacey. Sam also passes time making video calls to his wife and daughter. But then, on an expedition outside the station, Sam finds what looks like another , wounded astronaut. Actually, its a younger version of himself-a clone. Now there are two SAms. And whoa,do they have a lot to talk about. The double role suits Rockwell perfectly-in facet, its uits hima a little too well. AS an actor,he has always played flakes, screwups, and boyishly dazed myopic nutjobs. Some times he's been crazy-goofy (Choke, Box of Moonlight) sometimes crazy lethal (Snow angels, Confessions of a DAngerous Mind), but what defineds nearly every Rockwell Perfomance is it charming /annoying solipisit quality. Shaggy and horsey-handsome, hes like a man-child hypnotized byt his own brain-waves, and while this makse him a magnetic highflier it also means that he never entirely connects with anyone on screen. In Moon, Rockwell battles his double with a kind of fulminating acting-class intensity. Is the clone real? Is Sam going mad with isolation? Or is he the victim of a coasmic hallucinatory mind control scheme the parnoid pawin in a Pilip K. Dickian game of Don Astronauts Dream of Electric Clones? You can meditate away, but a bottom the movie is 97 minutes of Sam Rockwell jabbering to himself. Moon is the first feature to be directed by Duncan Jones, who is David Bowies son and he brings it a grimy industrial look-the furutre strip-minded ofall romance or idealism as well as witty touches like giving Gerty a smiley face screen that changes expression in tandem with Spacey's voice. Jones truly puts you on the moon; he does a technically imaginative job befitting the son of the man who fell to earth. Next time, though he'd do well to make a movie that breathes as much as it mind trips. B-