Cool Visions of the future: Moon

Not every cool vision of the future needs to be an expansive re imagining society. Some are simply postulations of one element of the world. The 2009 film Moon is on such example. In portraying a mining plant on the lunar surface, Moon is able to explore concepts of space travel, the potential of artificial intelligence, and the ethics and implications of cloning. Its hard science fiction at its best, interesting, intellectual and entertaining.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell an astronaut for the private company Lunar Industries who maintains an automated  base harvesting Helium-3. He’s alone on the moon except for his computerized assistant GERTY. Nearing the end of his 3 year term Sam is starting to show signs of wear due to extreme isolation. A damaged satellite leaves him unable to regularly communicate with Earth.  When one of the harvesters breaks he heads out to only fix, it only to be injured. Later Sam wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what has happened. When he notices a space suit missing he goes to the harvester to investigate where he finds a copy of himself clinging to life. It turns out that each Sam is only an individual in a series of clones grown on the moon. They’re programmed with the same memories and has been serving the same 3 year mission repeatedly. The stasis pod to return home is an incinerator. At the end of each term, a degenerating clone gets in the pod thinking he’s going home for medical treatment only to be cremated. Alone on the moon the two Sams need to come to terms with what has been done to them,  find a way  to return to earth and report the crime before their employer sends people to kill them.

Artificial gravity aside, Moon does a phenomenal job portraying space travel. Sam is shown dealing with one of the biggest problems space explorers will face: killing time. He runs, plays ping pong, builds a model village, and creates video messages for his family. All of which are used to fill the mind crushing boredom he faces. Space travel will be long hauls of waiting and trying to prevent muscle matter from deteriorating. Sam’s continous exercise it similar to how astronauts work out to stave off the loss of muscle matter. The sets of the Moon Base look like a bunker. The filmmakers logic explained that the thought space travelers would want to use the supplies available to them. During a screening to NASA a scientist explained she was actually working on the creation of mooncrete made from supplies on the moon.

The robot GERTY explores Artificial Intelligence in the context of realism. GERTY falls into a strange place in the uncanny valley. He is toy like, similar to R2D2 or Wall-E yet the ultra human voice of Kevin Spacey anthropomorphes GERTY to an unsettling degree. As soon as he appeared onscreen I expected a sinister HAL 9000 rip off. Man vs machine alone on a moon base is the perfect set up for a space thriller. We even get a few creepy glimpses of GERTY telling  Sam’s superiors about the clones self awareness. I was pleasantly surprised to see that moon went a different route. GERTY repeatedly assists Sam. He provides a password without him asking and releases a new clone so one of the others can escape. Though GERTY’s programming is to control Sam, he genuinely seems to care for Sam and is upset when one of them dies. Unlike other scifi stories which make robots into soulless kill bots or  metal humans Moon takes a different approach. GERTY isn’t a person but he isn’t simply the moon base’s computer. He’s more than the sum of his parts, and somewhere with the layers of code he might have a degree of humanity.

Within moon’s context what’s done by Lunar Industries IS illegal, and generally regarded as immoral. Through we are a long way off from the cryogenic assembly line Sams portrayed in Moon, human cloning is a a controversial issue today.  Moon raises some of the ethical implications of cloning. Because Sam Bell has the right mental and physical profile he is turned into a replicable cog in a machine. It’s not far of a logical leap for a person cloning themselves for a bone marrow or organ transplant. What is the value of a human created in such a manner? Each Sam is a unique and legitimate person. They have real feelings for their family, and develop their own personalities and quirks. When Sam watches the video of his predecessors each has a different style, and point of view.  They’re even capable of nobility and self sacrifice. When turned into one of many Sam is disposable to Lunar Industries but as a person his life does have value. If human beings can be cloned to provide compatible tissue matches does that lessen the value of human life? If a person is to be cloned, then said clone must be entitled to the inalienable rights all human beings are given.

Hard Science Fiction is hard to come by, and Moon is a brilliant example of it. It creates a small vision of a world we may one day face and forces the viewers to think while being entertained. It is a film about scientific ideas set in story format, creating a cool vision of the future.