Moon! Sunday, January 10, 2010

I don't know if it'd make much sense to make an annual list of top science fiction movies. Frankly, not enough of them get made to compete, but this year was different.









If you missed Moon you owe it to yourself to rent it when it comes out on DVD next week. It's not that the story's so great--the twist at the end is the story, and while it's fun it's also sort of cheap. The really great thing about it is twofold. First, you've got Sam Rockwell pretty much holding down the fort solo, and to his credit, he's fascinating to watch throughout. That's he's really the only actor in the movie illustrates the point that what's merely intellectual in a high-concept Louis Malle movie becomes actual, philosophical dreamwork in a spacesuit (that is to say, when the director has already asked you to suspend your disbelief at the door). Secondly, it's obvious that Duncan Jones likes the moon. I'll bet money that he liked the moon since he was a kid. I bet he's spent time daydreaming of the peculiar motion of men in fluffy spacesuits moving and bouncing around against the moon's desert, and that clear, clean shine the horizonline makes when unobstructed by atmospheric blur. I'm thinking he did not so much intend to make a movie but to do something with the moon. A movie was just the way to do it, the way Willis O'Brien made a beautiful animated monkey climbing the Empire State Building and asked himself: what can I do with this?

Runners up: District 9, of course, and I hate to say it but I sort of liked Avatar. Of course, I loved last year's Star Trek, but it does not bear repeated home viewings, as I discovered recently. How does Kirk not get arrested for bald Machiavellian intrigue, anyway?