Moon (2009)

Moon is a 2009 science fiction/thriller film about a solitary lunar employee who finds that he may not be able to go home to Earth so easily. The film is the feature film debut of commercial director Duncan Jones, and actor Sam Rockwell stars as the lunar employee. Kevin Spacey voices his robot companion.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee contracted by the company Lunar Industries to extract helium-3, which has reversed Earth's energy crisis. Sam is stationed at the lunar base Sarang with only a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), but two weeks before completing his three-year assignment, he begins to hallucinate. An extraction goes wrong and he wakes up, not knowing how he got there, and Sam begins to realise Lunar's plans to replace him when he finds a younger, angrier, version of himself.

Moon is the first feature film directed by commercial director Duncan Jones, who co-wrote the script with Nathan Parker.

The film was specifically written as a vehicle for actor Sam Rockwell and pays homage to the films of Jones's youth, such as Silent Running (1972), Alien (1979) and Outland (1981).

Jones described the intent, "We wanted to create something which felt comfortable within that canon of those science fiction films from the sort of late seventies to early eighties."

The director spoke of his interest in the lunar setting, "For me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it... There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don't know that much about it."

The director described the lack of romance in the Moon as a location, citing images from the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE, "It's the desolation and emptiness of it... it looks like some strange ball of clay in blackness... Look at photos and you'll think that they're monochrome. In fact, they're not. There simply are no primary colours." Jones referenced the photography book Full Moon by Michael Light in designing the look of the film.