[Marxism] 'Moon': New Sci-Fi Movie Indicts Our Culture of Exploitation

[Michael Friedman]

'Moon': New Sci-Fi Movie Indicts Our Culture of Exploitation
By Michael Dudley, AlterNet
Posted on July 22, 2009, Printed on July 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141442/

Duncan Jones' new film, Moon, opens with a piece of corporate
propaganda describing how, in the near future, humanity has moved
beyond the multiple environmental and social threats of the early 21st
century.

There are no more wars over oil, and no more starvation, thanks to a
global network of clean fusion reactors fueled with helium-3, which is
mined on the far side of the moon.

The source of this remarkable global transformation is revealed to be
in the hands of a single person, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell in an
astonishing performance), the solitary employee of Lunar Industries,
Inc. For nearly three years, Sam has monitored the mining of helium-3
from a small lunar base, his only companion a highly mobile,
ceiling-mounted robot named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Owing to
an apparent glitch in the corporation's orbiting communications
satellite, no direct communication with Earth is possible, leaving Sam
with pre-recorded videotapes as his only means of contact with his
wife, Tess (Dominique McElligott), and daughter.

At the start of the film, Sam is two weeks away from the end of his
solitude. He's counting the days by marking his sleeping quarter walls
with happy faces in felt pen, and whiling his time by carving a small
town out of wood. Disheveled, pale and clearly near the end of his
tether, he begins experiencing hallucinations, one of which leads him
to crash his lunar rover into a regolith harvester, apparently to be
buried alive.

Immediately, the film cuts to Sam's recovery in the medical bay. Yet
no rescue should have been possible. The audience begins to sense that
nothing about Sam's existence can be counted on as real.

[...]

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