Moon

Managed to catch Moon yesterday. I think it's going to be taken off soon and I'm really glad I managed to catch this movie. It wasn't really mind blowing, but in a sense, it gets you thinking about morality and ethics.

The basic premise is that Sam is on the Moon. He is working for this corporation that is harvesting stuff from the Moon to provide for clean energy on Earth. He has been here for close to 3 years, with 3 years being the length of his contract on the Moon. After that, he'll get to go home. He struggles through each day, and due to a communications failure, he can only receive recorded messages from his wife, messages that seem to be the only thing that keeps him going on.

On a routine maintainence mission, he hallucinates and sees someone standing beside a harvester. Being distracted by that, he crashes into the harvester.

The next scene shows him in the infirmary, in pretty good condition. How did he get there? Why does he not have any injuries? These questions are answered when Sam gets out of the space station to investigate the harvester. Beside the harvester, he finds a crashed space vehicle.

If you want to enjoy the movie, don't continue reading, just go watch it. If not spoilers ahead.

*SPOILERS*

In the vehicle, he finds a person. That person is Sam. He carries the body back to the space station and struggles with an identity crisis. He's a clone. What he knows are all memories implanted in him. How does he react? What should he do? Why is the company that hired him doing all these? Can he still go back home? What will happen when the other Sam wakes up? Is the other Sam a clone as well?

*SPOILERS*

Suffice to say, I won't be talking too much about the plot but it's really good.

But this movie does raise some interesting thoughts, especially regarding the ethics of cloning. Will there be one day in the future where corporations do this? Built clones and send them out to do work. Are the rights and feelings of clones of no consideration? Sam considers himself a human, but the robot that is working with him says that they're all just programmed. It's a strange moral tale.

Another interesting thing brought up is how much the clones differed from one another. They were all bases on the same person and at the point of creation had the same memories, but at the end of 3 years, they had wildly different hairstyles and mannerisms. It begs the question, if there was a clone of Hitler, but he was brought up in different circumstances, would that clone do what Hitler did?

The acting of Sam was top-notch, bringing out the desolation, isolation and eeriness of being stuck in a space station all by himself. The despair and anguish that he finds himself in when he realizes he is a clone. The overwhelming sadness he feels when he realizes that all the videos he saw were just recordings and that his wife is dead and his daughter is all grown up.

All in all, Moon is a gripping sci-fi tale, well paced and thoroughly terrifying.