It’s one thing to feel cut off from other people. It’s another thing to be alone thousands of miles above the earth.
A new film from Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón does a great job of showing the isolation felt by two cosmonauts who, in the words of David Bowie, are “sitting in a tin can, far above the world.”
Gravity stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts who get pelted by a debris storm, comprised of bits and pieces of old satellites. With their space shuttle disabled and their communications offline and they are forced to become Space MacGyvers in order to survive.
Bullock and Clooney aren’t the first movienauts to be cut adrift in space. From animated films like WALL-E to epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey Hollywood has mined the vastness of space in some unforgettable movies.
In the film Moon Sam Rockwell is astronaut Sam Bell, a Lunar Industries employee living and working on a space station on a three year contract.
His job is to tend to machines that are “harvesting solar energy from the dark side of the moon” and providing almost 70% of earth with power. His only companion is a robot / cup holder named Gerty (voiced by the appropriately named Kevin Spacey) although he can receive taped messages from his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott). The loneliness of the job is broken, however, when he discovers that he may not be truly alone.
The comparisons to 2001 are obvious, made even more apparent by Spacey’s HAL-like delivery of his robot lines, but director Duncan Jones has simply used Kubrick’s film as a visual reference on his way to creating a unique and fascinating film. Another thing he borrowed from Kubrick and many other sci-fi films of the 60s and 70s is his emphasis on ideas rather than special effects. Michael Bay this ain’t.
One of the earliest alone-in-space movies came in 1950. Destination Moon is noted as the first Hollywood movie to contain scientific representations of space travel. The story involves a two-man journey to the fifth largest moon in the Solar System and the difficult decision to leave one behind. Heralded at the time for its realism, through today’s eyes it looks somewhat corny. For example: “I know one thing,” says a spacesick General Thayer (Tom Powers), “unless these pills work, space travel isn’t going to be… popular.”
With a lineage like his it should come as no surprise that Duncan Jones’s first feature film, Moon, is a sci fi space epic. You see, Duncan Jones is better known as Zowie Bowie, first son of David Bowie, whose song Space Oddity became a top five hit forty years ago. He may be best known to triviaticians as Zowie but that should change with the release of this evocative and intelligent film.
Sam Rockwell is astronaut Sam Bell, a Lunar Industries employee living and working on a space station on a three year contract. “Three years is a long haul,” he says, wearing a t-shirt that reads It’s Almost Quittin’ Time. “It’s way, way, way too long. I’m ready to go home.”
His job is to tend to machines that are “harvesting solar energy from the dark side of the moon” and providing almost 70% of earth with power. His only companion is a robot / cup holder named Gerty (voiced by the appropriately named Kevin Spacey) although he can receive taped messages from his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott). The loneliness of the job is broken, however, when he discovers that he may not be truly alone.
The comparisons to 2001 are obvious, made even more apparent by Spacey’s HAL-like delivery of his robot lines, but Jones has simply used Kubrick’s film as a visual reference on his way to creating a unique and fascinating film. Another thing he borrowed from Kubrick and many other sci-fi films of the 60s and 70s is his emphasis on ideas rather than special effects.
Michael Bay this ain’t.
It’s a deliberately paced story packed with grand themes, unusual story twists and a dark covering of creeping dread. In the middle of it all is Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the lonely astronaut.
For a decade Rockwell has teetered on the verge of enormous mainstream success. He’s co-starred in big studio pictures with Nic Cage and George Clooney (Matchstick Men and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind respectively), earned street cred by starring in small difficult films like Choke and Snow Angels and has occasionally been the best thing in so-so movies like Joshua. He’s an inventive and fearless actor who delivers a performance in Moon that proves, once and for all, that he can carry a movie virtually by himself.
As Sam he hands in a performance ripe with longing, confusion, horror and yes, even a bit of humor.
Moon—which could easily have been retitled ***SPOILER ALERT*** The Clone Wars: This Time It’s Personal for commercial purposes—is a promising debut from a new director and a reminder of how good Sam Rockwell is.
“Source Code,” the second film from “Moon” director Duncan Jones, is a tough one to describe. Imagine “Groundhog Day” with a terrorist subplot, a romantic angle and an explosion every eight minutes or so and you start to get the idea.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot, who wakes up on a Chicago commuter train in the body of a suburban high school teacher. Baffled he makes small talk with the stranger across from him until the train is blown to bits by a terrorist bomb. Turns out he’s part of a high level government project called Source Code that allows him to inhabit the last eight minutes of a person’s life. Posing as this teacher he has a finite amount of time to discover and dismantle the bomb and help avert a much larger subsequent attack. Heroics aside, Colter begins to wonder what would happen if he went back into the source code permanently.
“Source Code” is sci fi in the mode as “Inception” and “The Adjustment Bureau,” stories that have metaphysical premises but are firmly rooted in the physical. In each case a wild plot is brought back to earth by strong characters that put a human face on the script’s fanciful ideas.
“Source Code” is a moderately less successful than “Inception” and “The Adjustment Bureau,” mostly because it doesn’t have the mind boggling depth of the former or the human touch of the latter. It exists somewhere in between, but it gains points from me for not being based on a video game or comic book.
Jones skillfully takes a premise that could easily have become tired very quickly—the replay of the same eight minutes over and over again—and adds in enough variation, enough detail to keep the viewer on board as Colter revisits the scene of the crime and slowly pieces the terrorist plot together.
Less successful is the romance angle. It’s sweet and ends on a hopeful note but isn’t as compelling as the love story in “The Adjustment Bureau.”
Despite that “Source Code” remains an interesting and novel piece of sci fi.
It’s one thing to feel cut off from other people. It’s another thing to be alone thousands of miles above the earth.
