Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Moon is one hour of a pretty decent, not bad movie, and half an hour of good at all movie. That it is split up into a convenient division between the two parts is nice (the first half hour is not good, the rest is sometimes pretty decent), but it also serves to make it feel as though the movie has not even started until it's almost a third of the way over. It is, in fact, deliberately misleading -- an attempt to trick the audience into thinking it is watching one movie, only to switch to a completely different movie at that half hour mark. It begins as a movie about isolation and paranoia in a harsh, unfeeling area of desolation, ala The Thing and probably a thousand other movies (Moon is also hampered by its need to reference other films, and to make those references as immediately apparent as possible), but by the second half has shifted to an actually sometimes interesting movie about the nature of identity, and the way in which habits transcend consciousness. Which is not to say that explorations of isolation and paranoia are not interesting, just that the movie does not handle them in a very interesting way. Perhaps Jones was too excited to get to the "real" part of the movie.

Sam Rockwell is as good as advertised, despite being hampered by the fact that Jones is not entirely sure how to shoot an actor talking to himself all that confidently. Too often the movie relies on easy back and forth close-ups, which is fine to emphasize their separateness and other ideas, but eventually distracts from the emotional development of the characters, as the fact that it's one guy playing both parts is constantly being reminded to the audience. This combines with the score's tendency to be like the wretched lovechild of John Williams and James Horner to rob nearly every scene that Rockwell plays brilliantly of any emotional weight it would've had.

Man, I ended up being a lot less nice to this movie than I meant to. It's really not that bad. If it weren't for Source Code's awful trailer, I'd be interested in what Jones has to offer in the future, once his talents are more matured.