Moon: A Review
I was looking through some of my old documents and found this review I did a while ago. I think some of you may find it interesting. I hope it shows that the medium of film can express complex philosophical ideas. I warn that there are spoilers.
I came across a DVD which on the front cover had the words ‘the best British sci-fi film since Moon’. I thought this bizarre, having never heard of Moon. But a couple of shelving units across I found this mysterious Moon for three pounds. Ahah! I thought. High praise indeed… What shameless advertising! That being said I still bought it, being a sucker for sci-fi films and bargains. What did I have to lose for three pounds?
I now wish I had paid more for it, as within capitalism money is the primary standard by which something’s worth is judged; return validates a film’s value. Moon returned a 100% profit, but we are talking ten million as opposed to the hundred million plus expected of blockbusters. It is budget that defines a blockbuster. A big return is expected because a big investment has been made and that’s how economics work, right? Hence even a poor to mediocre film can be a big earner, just invest more in advertising to hide the cracks.
But I digress. Moon is a genuinely good film that didn’t need a big budget or investment in advertising to be validated. It validates itself by its ideas and its pedigree. By pedigree I mean its self-conscious debt to the classics of hard sci-fi. The white interior of the moon base is clearly reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. GERTY the computer is obviously a cap-tip to HAL and the film plays on this beautifully. In an early scene suggesting the possibility of GERTY’s maleficence the camera drifts to the top of GERTY’s interface showing the machine’s title followed by the number 3000. Any viewer who has seen 2001 will instantly recognise the implication of this and thus readies themselves for a battle between man and machine.
But simultaneously the film works in another direction, using the same strategy to suggest another plot direction. Older Sam, at the beginning of the film, hallucinates that his wife and daughter are on the moon with him. A psychological storyline is thus suggested to the audience, something similar to Solaris. Indeed the first few scenes with older Sam walking through the corridors to find younger Sam nonchalantly exercising have a certain eerie surrealness about them that is very much reminiscent of Solaris.
And thus we have two simultaneous plots running alongside one another in a film that has only two characters. Has Sam succumbed to space madness or is GERTY hiding something detrimental to Sam? The film uses these subtle suggestions to subvert the audience’s expectations. It keeps us guessing in two different (though not necessarily incompatible) directions, only then to suggest a third direction which perhaps owes more to Blade Runner: both Sam’s are clones with implanted memories.
Apart from the psychological analysis of isolation, memory, growth and emotion, the overarching clone plot is where the film really comes into its own. The film takes place on the moon because the company Sarang extracts Helium-3 from moon rock. At the beginning we are told that this method of energy extraction solved the energy crisis that we are now facing. The technology is very much talked of in an idealist light; the face of a smiling African child is shown as Sam tells us that 70% of the planet is now powered by Helium-3. “All our problems are solved!” But the point of this film is that the master/slave relationship never disappears, but is only ever pushed back a step further to a new arena.
Europe up until the post-industrialisation era operated on the basis of domination (it still does really, but in perhaps more subtle configurations). The poor worked themselves into dust so as to maintain the elite’s luxury. Since WWII onwards this level of inequality has been deemed unacceptable. Now the majority of Europeans at least live in some level of comfort; work days are limited, minimum wages are imposed and so on. But the truth of capitalism is that it operates on the principle of domination, of master and slave reciprocity. And so the companies have sought cheap labour in the third world. The using up of our own natural resources has also forced us to seek out those of other countries. Thus the process of economic and political domination has lessened in our own countries (in their explicit forms anyway), but has proportionately increased in the rest of the world.
Helium-3 as a miracle source of energy on the moon, in theory, shouldn’t involve any oppression or domination. But, as the film makes apparent, even here there is master and slave. The difference is that the companies have had to create slaves anew, rather than merely enslaving those that already exist. This is the genius of setting the film on the moon: there are no indigenous people on the moon, nobody to oppress; but the fact that the company then still has to create slaves in order to operate makes it quite clear that the capitalist system cannot operate without domination.
The capitalist elements are only made explicit at the beginning of the film with the explanation of Helium-3 as a miracle energy source and at the end with Sam’s testimony causing the company’s share prices to drastically drop in value. The middle is filled with sci-fi references via cleverly subtle intonations that seek to subvert the audience’s expectations and an excellent psychological analysis that may be read as analysing the impact of capitalism or, more specifically, the psychology of a slave inside the capitalist system. I won’t enumerate the psychological analyses as I think that may require a second watch and I still want to pick up a couple of other points.
The first point is the subversion of the maleficent AI plot that has become somewhat of a trope (the plot, not its subversion) since 2001. The maleficent AI plot stems out of philosophical considerations as to whether an AI would actually have morality — the traditional answer being negative. People’s inherent conservatism has caused them to be generally weary of AI and their possible abuse of power. The trope that this feeling has formed often sees the AI becoming maleficent in reaction to a contradiction in its programming; a contradiction between carrying out its orders and the protection of the human’s whose safety it has been entrusted with. The fear of course is that an AI, not possessing some moral code, will always follow its programming (or might malfunction) at the expense of human life.
The point that Moon makes is that this is a prejudice; it even plays on this prejudice, carefully nurturing this view only to subvert it later in the film. GERTY enters the password for Sam so that he can access the previous recordings of his previous selves — all degenerating as they reach the end of their 3 year life span (maybe due to radiation, but more likely the result of an inherent design flaw (intentional or otherwise) in the clones). GERTY also suggests that Sam deletes GERTY’s memory and reboot him so that the incoming “rescue” team will not be aware of Sam’s escape. The film doesn’t seem to support the reading that GERTY was able to develop a sense of morality, for that would presumably involve some level of consciousness and the deleting of some of that consciousness’ memory is tantamount to death of that particular consciousness. Moreover, when Sam asks GERTY why he helped him, GERTY replies that he is here to help Sam. In this instance then, the AI’s programming to protect and help human life has in fact overridden its commands from the company to disavow human life. Technology is not inherently evil, as the maleficent AI trope might suggest and, moreover, the prejudicial blaming of it actually distracts and detracts from the actual issue: namely, humanity’s inability to effectively organise itself into a political community that is not based on oppression and domination. This sci-fi film that at first appears to be a psychological analysis of emotions in fact turns out to be a political treatise.
The film may also be read as a philosophical treatise if Sam’s isolation in the moon base and attempt to escape it is seen as a metaphor for existence. Ignoring the surface level Platonic Cave, I would prefer to read the film in terms of the human need for meaning. We are all drawn into this world with a pre-given meaning; we always already have meaning that is not our own, as made explicit by Sam’s implanted memories. The Older Sam seems unable to accept this, attempting to phone his long dead wife. The memories of his wife and daughter are always shown in the context of the older Sam; the younger Sam seems less attached to them and more capable of dealing with the inherent nihilism that he has had to come to terms with. The older Sam resigns himself to his fate (as his body is de-generating) and it is the younger Sam that is able to return to Earth and move forward with his life. It is not difficult to read this in Nietzschean terms: the older Sam could not come to terms with the nihilism of (his) existence and is left to die; whereas the younger Sam seems capable of staring into the abyss without the abyss staring back into him. The older Sam is unable to go beyond nihilism in the way that the younger Sam is.
These are the two choices for modern (wo(e))man; on entering the moment of nihilism, one can either get lost in the abyss, or push on beyond it. If we read this moment in the context of the overarching anti-capitalist agenda of the film, we may see that the moment of nihilism is most likely to arise for modern (wo(e))man when we realise that the primary mode of evaluation i.e. that of economic value is nihil. This moment, I suspect, often arrives in middle age — this is the point of existential crisis when you, perhaps at the peak of your career, realise that something is still missing, that economic prosperity has not provided you with happiness. Modern (wo(e))man does not live in the shadow of God as Nietzsche said, but in the shadow of Wallstreet. The question is how do we react to the realisation that Wallstreet is dead? Will we resign ourselves to our fate (still evaluating life on the given mode of evaluation)? Or will we face the abyss with a readiness to accept the return of life anew, to create value anew and move beyond nihilism in search of the noontide?
