Moon (DVD)

Nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries, Sam Bell is counting the days until his return to Earth. The lone occupant of a lunar mining base, Sam monitors the tractors that harvest the moon’s surface for helium energy. Buoyed by sporadic transmissions from his wife and young daughter, he combats monotony and isolation by tending to plants, continuing his predecessor’s woodcraft project, and interacting with the station’s robotic computer, Gerty. But Sam is beginning to unravel mentally. After a hallucination causes him to crash his lunar rover, he wakes up in the sick bay and soon realizes that his life at the base is not what it seems.Moon is a refreshingly philosophical and ultimately touching indie inflection on a genre that too often loses sight of character and story amid the wizardry of its special effects. In confining the story to one man (and his robot), director Duncan Jones and writer Nathan Parker create an intimate and insightful character piece about memory and identity anchored by Sam Rockwell's perceptive performance; he brings out the heartache, contradictory emotions, and existential terror of a man gradually stripped of the most fundamental sense of who he is. So for all the creativity of its visual design and technology, Moon is less about outer than it is about inner space.