The French word for “film director” would translate literally as
“realizer,” i.e., one who makes something real. That’s accurate in many
cases: The director takes a script and then turns words on paper into
images on a screen, choosing how long to hold a shot, what to point the
camera at, what sort of music to play, which parts to cut
out—basically deciding (or delegating the decision for)
everything you see and hear on screen.

A brilliant script can be ruined by poor directing, and a terrible
script can be made more than passable with the proper realization. In
Moon, we have an interesting case of great acting and a smart
story that’s hampered only by some bad decisions coming from the top:
cheesy and manipulative music, uninteresting cinematography and a
failure to let the ideas speak for themselves.

Still, Moon is a good film, but it could have been a great
film in different hands. Sam Rockwell, widely considered one of the
finest actors of his generation, gives an almost-solo performance
during Moon‘s 97 minutes, playing Sam Bell, the only inhabitant
of a lunar-mining station.

Bell has been on the station for nearly three years, and is
scheduled to return to Earth in a couple of weeks. For the entire time
he’s been there, the lunar communications satellite has been out, so he
can’t get live feeds from Earth. Instead, he records messages and sends
them to his wife, and receives recorded messages in return. But there’s
an odd sense of disconnect: The messages his wife sends never seem
related to the messages he’s sent out. Meanwhile, he drifts into the
kind of mental disturbance that comes from having nothing to do but
watch ancient sitcoms and build model houses.

His only companion is a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey).
Gerty has no face, only a tiny screen that displays a shifting
emoticon. This is director Duncan Jones’ best decision: The emoticon
face is so reductive that it adds a strange, distancing effect to the
emotional interaction while still conveying sentiment. The station,
too, is well-realized: It’s filthy, with bits of Sam’s personal goods
strewn about, and everything looks like it reeks of stale sweat.

Of course, just having Sam sit in the station for an hour and a half
wouldn’t make for much of a film, so something happens: As Sam grows
more distracted, he gets in an accident, driving a small lunar rover
into one of the giant mining machines. With no one at the station to
rescue him, it looks as though he won’t survive, and he falls
unconscious.

He wakes up in the station, with no recollection of how he got
there, and the story kicks into gear. This is where things get
interesting, and though this point happens early in the film, it’s the
first in a series of important reveals.

If you want to be surprised, both by the unusual early plot twist
and the directorial failings of this film, you should stop reading
here.

When Sam wakes up, he doesn’t remember the crash, but he does see
the wrecked lunar rover jammed under the mining machine, so he goes out
to investigate. Inside, he finds himself, unconscious in a space suit.
Which is a problem, since there should be only one Sam Bell. But if
there are two, then that raises a question: How many are there? Are any
of them the original Sam Bell? What about Sam’s wife? Both Sams
remember, love and miss her, and both think that they merely have to
finish a contract on the moon, and then they’ll be reunited with
her.

The film does well with the philosophical material—not only
the questions about identity and memory, but also about the
technological aspect of slavery. Throughout, Rockwell does a great job,
especially when acting against himself. Unfortunately, some of the
action is unmotivated; there are strongly emotional scenes that, out of
context, look great, but are hard to understand within the film’s
framework.

I assume this is the fault of director Jones, since he seems to want
to ramp up the emotion as cheaply as possible. The worst aspect of this
comes in the form of the music: Gloopy, minor-key piano dirges are
introduced to let us know that loneliness is sad. Very, very sad. If
Jones had instead focused on Rockwell’s strong capacity to convey
feeling, and used silence or the droning, ambient tones of the working
space station, the emotion would have been conveyed without the
eye-rolling cheesiness.

Jones also never holds a shot long enough for it to become truly
tense. In a film about boredom and detachment, sometimes the greatest
effect can come from staying on a subject until the audience is made
uncomfortable. Jones seems to fear this, and cuts away before the
discomfort sets in. And he’s horrible at framing: The exterior shots of
the giant mining machines kicking up moon dust look like they were
filmed by randomly placing a camera on the set and then just pointing
it at the action.

But none of that ruins the film. The ideas, the interiors, the
robot’s emoticon face and Rockwell’s performance all make it
worthwhile. It’s just that, in more capable hands, these very same
elements could have been used to create a great movie instead of a
merely decent one.

This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2009.