Moon

Judging from the advertisements, Moon seemed to be about a man going slowly insane on, well, the moon. I assumed it was more of a movie like Event Horizon, where a lonely person stumbles on some mind-blasting truth. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Actually, that's an accurate description of the film – it's jut that the mind-blasting truth is eminently relatable and human. Moon's a lot more complicated than it looks.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole inhabitant of a moon base dedicated to mining Helium-3 for Lunar Industries. His companion is GERTY (Kevin Spacey), a ceiling-hung robot that expresses itself through emoticons. For three years, Sam has overseen the various mining robots, worked on his wooden models, talked to his plants, and longed to be reunited with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw). With his time up, he's ready to go home. The catch is that Sam perceives everything through a filtered lens – even his transmissions to Earth are delayed. Sam isn't just alone for three months; he's alone without any synchronous human contact.

Red herrings abound. It's easy to focus on the HAL-like robot GERTY, a major character and foil for Sam. How can you trust something that sounds so benign as Kevin Spacey? Ironically, GERTY is one of the most human characters on the base.

Moon's twist isn't in the revelation of The Truth, but in its implications. Moon questions who Sam is, what he represents, and what makes him – and us – human. We are, the director seems to say, defined by our memories, and that's enough to fuel us in our daily grind. Sam is every worker who has been at it for years, always waiting for the next big break, the next reorganization, the next lotto ticket that will get him out of the crappy dead end job. It's a lot like Memento, high praise for a film that cost just $5 million to produce.

The fun is in watching Sam deal with the truth of his situation and how he rises above it (or succumbs to it). Moon is littered with clues, making it worth another view. This is a tightly crafted, smart film that takes a single science fiction element and explores it thoroughly.