- Starring
- Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligot
- Director
- Duncan Jones
- Rating
- 2009
- Genre
- Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi
- Release date
- July 22
- Where to watch
- Prime Video
In the 2009 science fiction film Moon, directed by Duncan Jones, Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, an astronaut nearing the end of his three-year solitary mission on a lunar base. Tasked with mining helium-3, a vital energy source for Earth, Sam’s isolation begins to take a toll on his mental health. As he experiences hallucinations and a series of strange events, he uncovers a shocking truth about his existence and the nature of his mission
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One comment
Sweet Deals
August 17, 2025 at 9:42 pm
I hadn’t heard of this film until it was put up on “You Rate It”. My curiosity was piqued, so I took a look. I’m not disappointed. I genuinely enjoyed the movie.
Sam Bell is essentially working on an oil rig in outer space mining energy resources. He operates all alone on a lonely moon base that is surprisingly spacious for a structure only meant to accommodate one human at a time, with only a non-sentient AI robot assistant named Gerty for company. His contract is only for three years, and while the film gives brief glimpses of Sam doing his job by watching automated robots working on monitors and driving rovers outside to check on them when they inevitably break, most of the movie is about Sam biding his time until his contract is over and he can finally return to his wife and daughter back on Earth. Sam has quite a few things to do in order to not be bored: in addition to seeing him eating, sleeping, taking a shower and getting his hair cut, we also see him running on a treadmill, whittling an entire model city out of wood, raising plants in a makeshift greenhouse, and watching old pre-recorded sitcoms. His private moonbase looks a lot like a bachelor pad, honestly.
The main mystery of the movie begins when Sam begins to hallucinate, and it’s unclear why. Sam also finds a series of odd clues that suggest the things he’s been told by the company who contracted him are not necessarily true. Sam spends most of the movie talking to himself, sometimes literally, and asking Gerty important questions and getting frustrated when Gerty refuses to give him a straight answer. Because Sam is hallucinating it’s difficult for him to determine what’s real and what’s not while he’s dealing with his frustrations and trying to solve the mystery: he gradually learns that he’s never really going to get home because the company is gaslighting him into overstaying his contract by a lot longer than he anticipated by carefully ensuring that Sam cannot receive any live feeds from Earth; everything he hears and sees is pre-recorded. He has no idea how long he’s been in outer space, and there’s no sign that can tell him otherwise. Apparently, instead of paying him fairly, the company preferred to simply set him up there and forget about him, even though it likely took a lot more time, trouble and expense to make that work.
There’s not much room for wokeness in a film about a man living alone on the moon and talking to himself. But I will say that while not having access to live feeds from Earth can be lonely and leave you uninformed and susceptible to gaslighting, it also means that you don’t have to put up with the din of thousands of angry voices complaining about what’s going on down there.