Moon

Mmmm. Nice.

Hark back to the seventies, with films like 2001, and Silent Running, when
sci-fi mean a lone astronaut, isolated from humanity, with only computers and
androds for company, then encountering something that makes them question their
sanity an the meaning of life. You know, before Star Wars fucked it up for
everyone. Because much as we love Star Wars, it did to Sci Fi Films what
Tolkein did to Fantasy Fiction - made everything that came after follow its
template.

This is a film like that. Sam Rockwell plays an astronaut/maintenance guy,
whose job is to be the single living component in an automated mining concern
on the dark side of the moon, which extracts He3 from the lunar surface and
sends it back to earth to power fusion energy reactors.

The place is tatty and down at heel, the comms is bust, and the guy's been
stuck up there for three years, and coming to the end of his contract, going a
bit crazy and peculiar. Then there's a bit of an accident, and things start to
get a tiny bit bizarre.

The aesthetic of the thing is very seventies moonbase, with everything chunky
and white and labeled in all-caps bold san serif font, robots that don't look
like anything in particular, moon buggys with big balloon tyres, suspiciously
high gravity... the thing looks nostaligically wonderful.

I highly recommend this film to anyone with a sufficiently long attention span.
If I have a criticism, it's that as the mystery slowly unfolds, there aren't
too many surprises if you have a bit of experience with the genre. But shocks
and surprises aren't part of the deal, more a slow reveal and realisation of
the inevitable.