(no subject)
Duncan Jones' Moon is the best film I've seen all year. It was made on a microbudget of $5 million but still looks amazing. (To compare, this year's new Transformers film cost $200 million to make and looks like a child blowtorching lego models for two hours straight.)
It's like watching a film beamed in from an alternate reality where George Lucas never made Star Wars and the dominant artistic tropes of science fiction films were limned from Tarkovsky's Solaris and Silent Running and 2001 Space Oddyssey and Alphaville. Special effects and large-scale spectacle take a backseat to innovative and brilliant acting, scriptwriting, and camera work. Directors are not afraid to have moments-- long moments!-- in the film where things don't blow up and people don't shout.
In this reality, a glut of pre-millenial apocalypse films were still released in the late nineties, but they all took their cues from Don McKellar's Last Night and not Deep Impact or Armaggedon.
(Look, I can dream, okay?)
Anyway, Moon is great. It's about a miner coming towards the end of a three year solo contract. He gets into an industrial accident, wakes up, and realises his double is on the station with him. This isn't really a spoiler.
The appropriate wanker's phrase to use here is "it's an exploration of what it means to be human" (if you type that in any review of anything you've ever seen, heard or watched, you may as well stop trying), which makes it sound like every Stephen Spielberg film ever made and most sixth form productions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but, well, okay, it sort of is. Without ever beating you over the head (or asking the question out loud, impressively) it asks whether one's personality is formed from experience or from something internal and static. It does this quietly, subtly, and while you're being blindsided by Sam Rockwell's acting.
Sentimental 'explorations of what it means to be human' are ten-a-penny in science fiction (I'm fucking looking at you, AI), what makes Moon brilliant is how understated it is, and how warm, and humane, and funny. It manages to be 'humane' and 'touching' without ever making me want to throw things at the screen at the sheer saccharine gooeyness (ET can fuck off right back home is what I'm saying), and it tempers everything with some genuinely visceral sickness, loneliness and misery. There's also one piece of diegetic music which serves as the darkest, cruellest and funniest gag I've seen/heard onscreen since Criminal Minds used Enya to soundtrack an entire family being slaughtered.
It's also an unabashedly socialist parable about the exploitation and dehumanisation of workers by massive corporations, so obviously I enjoyed it.
Anyway: Moon, dir. Duncan Jones, probably showing somewhere near you, only 90 minutes long.
It's like watching a film beamed in from an alternate reality where George Lucas never made Star Wars and the dominant artistic tropes of science fiction films were limned from Tarkovsky's Solaris and Silent Running and 2001 Space Oddyssey and Alphaville. Special effects and large-scale spectacle take a backseat to innovative and brilliant acting, scriptwriting, and camera work. Directors are not afraid to have moments-- long moments!-- in the film where things don't blow up and people don't shout.
In this reality, a glut of pre-millenial apocalypse films were still released in the late nineties, but they all took their cues from Don McKellar's Last Night and not Deep Impact or Armaggedon.
(Look, I can dream, okay?)
Anyway, Moon is great. It's about a miner coming towards the end of a three year solo contract. He gets into an industrial accident, wakes up, and realises his double is on the station with him. This isn't really a spoiler.
The appropriate wanker's phrase to use here is "it's an exploration of what it means to be human" (if you type that in any review of anything you've ever seen, heard or watched, you may as well stop trying), which makes it sound like every Stephen Spielberg film ever made and most sixth form productions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but, well, okay, it sort of is. Without ever beating you over the head (or asking the question out loud, impressively) it asks whether one's personality is formed from experience or from something internal and static. It does this quietly, subtly, and while you're being blindsided by Sam Rockwell's acting.
Sentimental 'explorations of what it means to be human' are ten-a-penny in science fiction (I'm fucking looking at you, AI), what makes Moon brilliant is how understated it is, and how warm, and humane, and funny. It manages to be 'humane' and 'touching' without ever making me want to throw things at the screen at the sheer saccharine gooeyness (ET can fuck off right back home is what I'm saying), and it tempers everything with some genuinely visceral sickness, loneliness and misery. There's also one piece of diegetic music which serves as the darkest, cruellest and funniest gag I've seen/heard onscreen since Criminal Minds used Enya to soundtrack an entire family being slaughtered.
It's also an unabashedly socialist parable about the exploitation and dehumanisation of workers by massive corporations, so obviously I enjoyed it.
Anyway: Moon, dir. Duncan Jones, probably showing somewhere near you, only 90 minutes long.