quote:
It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive.Thankfully, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. Finally, he will leave the isolation of “Sarang,” the moon base that has been his home for so long, and he will finally have someone to talk to beyond “Gerty,” the base’s well-intentioned, but rather uncomplicated computer.
Suddenly, Sam’s health starts to deteriorate. Painful headaches, hallucinations and a lack of focus lead to an almost fatal accident on a routine drive on the moon in a lunar rover. While recuperating back at the base (with no memory of how he got there), Sam meets a younger, angrier version of himself, who claims to be there to fulfill the same three year contract Sam started all those years ago.
Confined with what appears to be a clone of his earlier self, and with a “support crew” on its way to help put the base back into productive order, Sam is fighting the clock to discover what’s going on and where he fits into company plans.
Hope the story and execution are good; it would be nice to see more of this kind of SF at the movies.
http://tinyurl.com/masterful-moon
If you get a chance, go see it.
http://nancykress.blogspot.com/2009/07/cranky-at-movies.html
Jennifer, you might want to warn people of the spoilers on Nancy Kress's blog, because Kress doesn't provide any warning.
SPOILERS--------------------------------------------------------
The funny thing is that each and every point that Kress brings up can be countered with a reasonable explanation, the most important one being that the clones don't know they're clones til one goes outside the base to retrieve the body of the other clone. And that's all within the first half hour. It's not a movie about "evil corporations", but about a man coming to grips with who and what he is.
I mean, yeah, there should've been some "bounciness" in the base (it is ON the moon after all), but...seriously, it's one thing to say that a character piece isn't her cup of tea, but to fault the movie for the PATH it took---
1) "plants jammers on the moon"--why wouldn't there be antennae scattered on the moon...that could also be utilized as jammers? I'm sure at one point there were REAL people on the moon, and I just assumed that those "jammers" were actually something else before they were jammers.
2) "despite being programmed by the corporation"--I didn't think they were programmed. I thought they were clones that had implanted memories from the original human being that they used for the clone. I mean, that's what they said in the movie, but, hey, maybe I should've spent more time thinking about it instead of watching the movie.
3) "'uploaded memories'"-- again, the memories were his from a period of time, and I thought the videos were real, as evidenced by the fact that there was a deliberate EDIT in one of the videos. That kinda clued me into the fact (when I bothered to think about it later) that it must've been actual videos from the wife to the husband 'cause she was obviously distressed about their relationship. Again, possibly the original SAM was there setting up the equipment/project managing and GERTY (the computer) and those were videos from that time period.
4) "an escape pod"--not an escape pod, but a means of transportation for the H3. Or, hell, let's be charitable to Kress' logic here and pretend that yes, it was really an escape pod. Why is it there? I don't know, maybe OSHA wanted them to have it there. But it doesn't matter, 'cause the clones were NEVER going to use the thing as an escape pod. They thought they had a 3 year contract, and there was a different method of returning to Earth.
5) "a 'secret room'"--yeah, that's why they call them secret. Again, the clones have/had no reason to look for a secret room.
6) "all this is 'cheaper'"--has Kress ever worked for a big corporation before? But, regardless, yeah, it probably was cheaper to just have someone up there with the knowledge of the mining operation than a whole team. I mean, yeah, one person IS going to be cheaper, especially when that one person is a clone who thinks he's only there for 3 years and the implied reason he took the job was a break for the benefit(?) of his marriage.
Look: I didn't like Star Trek 'cause there were crazy science issues in that that make Moon look like a paper written by Einstein, but Star Trek was entertaining, and Moon was entertaining also if you went with the first half hour of the flick and thought, "ok, so this is where it's going to go..."
One man's meat is another man's poison, but to disregard Moon 'cause you THOUGHT the science was wonky (even though the problems addressed by Kress aren't really hard science issues) is doing a disservice to what I think the creators were trying to accomplish.
BTW, sorry I didn't mention her post had spoilers. It wasn't an intentional omission.