It’s not exactly life on mars, but one of those weird little movies that I’m looking forward to this year is director Duncan Jones’ simply titled Moon.
Jones, by the way, is the son of David Bowie, a musician who is of course no stranger to space and it’s oddities. When I realized their connection, my mind immediately flashed to Bowie’s song, “Moonage Daydream,” which has to be one of the most alien love songs ever:
The film itself looks very interesting to me, like an art house sci fi piece set on the truly desolate lunar satellite. I was scanning the Wikipedia page on the film, and I liked Jones’ mention of the contrast between the mythic nature the moon holds for us while at the same time utterly lacking romance and beauty. It’s just pure desolation up there, and he cites the images that have come from Japan’s lunar orbiter, SELENE, when talking about it.
Here’s the trailer:
And the plot description from Wikipedia, if for some reason the trailer doesn’t picque your curiousity:
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee contracted by the company Lunar to mine on the Moon the natural gas Helium 3, which could reverse Earth‘s energy crisis. Sam is stationed at the lunar base Sarang with only a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), but two weeks before completing his three-year assignment, he begins feeling out of place. An extraction goes wrong, and Sam suspects Lunar of trying to replace him as he realises someone else is on the Moon
Interesting stuff. The film also stars the truly lovely Kaya Scodelario, from one of my favorite shows (if you’ve never noticed from reading this blog), Skins.
I think you can see her very briefly in the trailer.
It reminds me of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine from a few years ago, but hopefully better. The thing about Sunshine was… you really wanted to like it. You didn’t want it to be a mash up of a lot of better films, but it kind of was. It had some beautiful imagery to it, but over all… I just don’t know if it worked. If it failed, it was certainly an interesting failure, but even still…
Let’s hope that the differences between Boyle’s film and Jones’ are night and day.
Looks like KUBRICK meets YAHOO CHAT: bring it on. Duncan should have reverted to “Zowie” to promote this. PS Spacey is no Rains.
Ha ha. Kubrick meets Yahoo chat emoticons looks like a nice way to sum this film up via the trailer.
Well, looks like it’ll be better than “CQ”, anyway…
Yeah, Sunshine kind of sucked. I totally expected it to be worthwhile too. This looks slightly like it. I just watched the trailer and really can’t wait to find out.
I really like the look of a lot of Sunshine, but it falls seriously short, I’m afraid. The new Ronald D. Moore pilot reminds me a lot of it, just with more of an attempt to cash in on/comment on “reality TV.” And I really wanted to see CQ, by… one of the Coppola kids, right? Roman? I remember that he kind of secretly co-directed Lost In Translation.