Start Your 2010 Hugo Watches
Jul. 13th, 2009 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluWell, I guess I will have to buy a supporting membership in Aussiecon4, so as to be sure to nominate for the Hugos. Because if Moon does not win a long-form Hugo for best dramatic presentation next year, it will not be my fault. Damn. What you have here is that rarest of combinations: good story telling, excellent performances, and genuine science-y science fiction, in a movie. Boggles the mind. Word of warning to space opera fans: what you will not find in Moon: ray guns, interstellar dreadnoughts, dogfights in space, car chases, brass bikinis, or explosions. And, despite being a story about an employee of a mining company in space, there are no chest-exploding aliens, and no High Noon in Space either. It's not SciFi (or even SyFy), in other words.
Sam Rockwell won the Best Actor title at SIFF recently, and deserved every bit of it. He delivers two different stages of a lonely, taciturn man with an anger-control problem, and the script gives him enough room to bring touches of sweetness and profound vulnerability to the performance.
The film has been described as having a pre-Star Wars look and feel, and I think there is some truth to that. Living in a mining station on the dark side of the Moon is a lot more austere and less fantastical than racing land speeders on Tatooine, though, so it fits. And, as in so much of the film, the look and feel deliberately echoes back to the classics of the genre. The director cites Silent Running as an influence, and the spoor of 2001 is everywhere. Some of the finest story-telling is found in observed details of the background: the smiley face hash marks in the latrine, counting days of Sam's contract, the names of the remote mining rovers on their monitors (they're named after the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, only one name has been crossed out in marker and re-labeled "Judas"), and the "Kick me" post it on the back of the primary remote for the station's robotic caretaker, Gerty.
Kevin Spacey plays the lipid-neutrality of Gerty's voice with just the right near-lilt to remind us of HAL 9000 in 2001, and the script plays off that resemblance in clever ways. I particularly liked the way the invoked ghost of HAL in our minds is a foil for telling a very different story. They tell me this film is a bit hard to find, but if you are a fan of actual science fiction, I recommend going the extra mile to see it.
Sam Rockwell won the Best Actor title at SIFF recently, and deserved every bit of it. He delivers two different stages of a lonely, taciturn man with an anger-control problem, and the script gives him enough room to bring touches of sweetness and profound vulnerability to the performance.
The film has been described as having a pre-Star Wars look and feel, and I think there is some truth to that. Living in a mining station on the dark side of the Moon is a lot more austere and less fantastical than racing land speeders on Tatooine, though, so it fits. And, as in so much of the film, the look and feel deliberately echoes back to the classics of the genre. The director cites Silent Running as an influence, and the spoor of 2001 is everywhere. Some of the finest story-telling is found in observed details of the background: the smiley face hash marks in the latrine, counting days of Sam's contract, the names of the remote mining rovers on their monitors (they're named after the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, only one name has been crossed out in marker and re-labeled "Judas"), and the "Kick me" post it on the back of the primary remote for the station's robotic caretaker, Gerty.
Kevin Spacey plays the lipid-neutrality of Gerty's voice with just the right near-lilt to remind us of HAL 9000 in 2001, and the script plays off that resemblance in clever ways. I particularly liked the way the invoked ghost of HAL in our minds is a foil for telling a very different story. They tell me this film is a bit hard to find, but if you are a fan of actual science fiction, I recommend going the extra mile to see it.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}