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This looks awesome. Comes out here in Denver on July 3rd.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/moon/
http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/moon/

No, this is *not* New Moon (http://www.apple.com/trailers/summit/newmoon/).

I think this, along with The Road, ranks as a Movie I Am Looking Forward To for the year. I nearly always enjoy the "man vs himself IN SPAAAAACE" theme.

Sam Rockwell is a fine actor.

They gave the movie away in the trailer.

As someone on GF.com said, the only thing left unanswered is whether they recycle him into meat product to feed the others at the end of his tour.

Waiting for it to come out near me.

Just saw this tonight.  Excellent film.  You can definitely see the Alien/2001 influence.  As for the trailer giving away the twist, the film gives it away in the first 15-20 minutes.  The focus is really on the implications after Sam's discovery.

Wow.  This looks like fun.  Wish it was showing locally.  I'd have to trek to SF, Berkeley, or Santa Cruz to see it.  Grr.

Just saw this movie here in Berkeley.  Really enjoyed it.  As mentioned, the "twist", or what ever you call it, is given away right off the bat.  The movie is all about how you deal with it.

It was overall a slow, surreal, sort of movie, but I loved it.

Cereal movie? Is that the early morning version of a popcorn movie?

God damn retarded spell checker.   :awesome_for_real:

Sam Rockwell is an awesome actor. I wish he'd get more high profiled stuff.  Matchstick Men was made terrific by all his effort, and he barely saved HHGTTG for me.

This looks amazing. Thanks for the FYI.

Saw this last night.  A film hasn't done such a thorough job of confusing my emotions in a long time.  Highly recommended.

Marvelous. Betrays a lot of stereotypes to good effect. Gerty is adorable.

I expected it to be gimmicky and generic and it was anything but.

Saw this last night.  Film is amazing.  It plays with the audience's expectations in great ways, and Sam Rockwell gives one of the best performances I've seen in quite a while.  If it's at a theater in your city, watch it now.

Just came back from this. Very good flick, reminiscent of 70s scifi flicks like 2001 and Silent Running.

Saw it. It was good. I have no idea about your spoiler though - I suspect a bunch of stuff was cut and the answer to that was probably something that hit the cutting floor.

~

Visually stunning, emotionally crushing, in every way the film I was hoping to see and more. It managed a brilliant thing in having a wonderful (if hard to bear) conceit that never has the chance to outstay its welcome. Tour de Force from Rockwell, one of the finest character actors out there, so good to see him get into something at once intelligent and defining.

As important to the scifi genre as Let the Right One In was for horror/vampire flicks. These movies are rare, and should be cherished.

 

I was about to post in agreement with Engles about the dark-haired girl not being the daughter but IMDB agrees with Mattemeo.  Kaya Scodelario played "Eve Bell" and is indeed a dark-haired girl (http://images.google.com/images?q=Kaya%20Scodelario&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi)

Hey, guys, the film threads are for discussing films. No need to Spoiler tag everything. People only come here after they've seen the movie.

The daughter was Effie from Skins. Sam was actually sexy in this film, in a sort of Erick McCormack-ish way. I loved this movie for all of the reasons you all have mentioned.


Very astute observation, I agree.


They randomly misspelled "satellite" on the console in several scenes, which implies (to me) that there may have been a slight oversight on details.

Moon kicked ass.  And thank you for bringing up Let the Right One In as being similarly good.  I rented it, and it too kicked ass, so I'm happy.

Just got back from seeing this.  Very satisfactory.  I'm not sure if I can think of a better pure sci-fi film off the top of my head, in fact.

I saw it a few weeks ago, and was similarly impressed. That said, it isn't as "cold" (in the sense of 60s/70s hard sci-fi) as all the reviews have made it out to be. Or, at least, there aren't too many of those Kubrickian pauses that in 2001 chill you with the vastness/emptiness of space.

Which isn't to say the movie doesn't portray Sam's isolation well, it's just that the movie felt more sentimental (almost romantic, in an understated way) than I expected, if you know what I mean.

Just saw it, really fantastic.

Sam Rockwell. Galaxy Quest. Stole the Spotlight.

He really didn't, but I can see why you'd think he did.

alan rickman imo

Galaxy Quest was all-around awesome.

wife and I saw this last Sunday.  Just terrific. 

You know, it sounds pretentious, but I really sometimes think I can predict the end of any TV show or movie or book etc.  When I can't it just makes me grin.  Wonderful movie, and Sam Rockwell came through as I hoped.   :grin:

Saw this the other night, enjoyed it a lot. It did feel like there was stuff missing though, but these days I find myself preferring films to be cut down to a reasonable length if it's done well. 2+ hour long films are an unfortunate trend.

In fact, this film was good enough for me to manage to ignore the occasionally stupid physics easily  :awesome_for_real:

I think i must have seen some other version to everyone else. Sat down with decent expectations and then watched a movie go absolutely nowhere for two hours (or however long it was). Two clones fight, one dies, other one escapes into spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. The fuck was the point of this film?

Clones have feelings too.

Obviously, it wasn't for you.

It showed the multiple sides of human emotion, and how emotional attachment doesn't have to be associated with a living being, but anything that makes decisions (What Rockwell says to Gertty* at the end of the movie). Or at least that was what my over-analyzing techniques pulled from the movie.

I was just really glad it didn't turn into an evil robot flick where the ships AI turns rogue and tries to doom the passengers.

The ending was not what I expected it to be, and I certainly didn't expect him to be a clone or anything. I actually had no idea what the movie was all about (I find that tends to make them better, not knowing), and I initially thought it was going to be another horror flic in space. Obviously that didn't pan out, but I certainly did not regret putting it on.

In fact, the plot twist made me :grin:

Finally saw this. I wanted to love this movie. I ended up liking it - maybe I was way too tired to watch a movie this slow. Again, I liked it a good bit, I just didn't love it. Rockwell was fantastic, but he always is. I hope he gets some Oscar thought for this, but I'd be surprised if there was much serious Oscar buzz because it's scifi. It's one of those movies that I'll probably think about for a long time, which tells me it's very successful artistically. My only real criticism is I wanted to like it more.

God damn.  FINALLY got around to watching this.   Fantastic performance from Sam Rockwell and a beautifully understated film that expects its audience to have more than two brain cells to rub together.   

Agreed, very good movie eventhough it has quite a few plotholes. One of my favourite tidbits is that it took me until well after the film to realize that there hadn't actually been two Sam Rockwell on screen but a case of very tactfully used CG.

Also, the AI being benevolent while avoiding the cliché "I have FEELINGS" drivel was a nice touch.

Oh, great music too in fact.

I'm here to keep you safe, Sam. I want to help you.

beautiful film holes and all

You think that was tactful? Here's one to cook your noggin: Gerty was almost entirely CG. The practical robot props did not move. At all. Not the arms, not turning, nothing. They built the entire moonbase set in the computer so that the lighting would be exactly right.

This is one of the movies that goes into my "rewatch anytime" bin.
Just a beautifully done movie with few large plot holes.

Fiction without the "trying too hard". It just works. A truly high quality film.

Thanks for the "Let the Right One In" recommendation, watched it today on Netflix. Very good. I see they are making a US version... I wonder how horrid that will be.

The remake is being done by Matt Reeves, who directed "Cloverfield", which is of course a very divisive movie itself, but he gets the material, at least. Given that the film can be made for a very small budget, he's been given the freedom to just film it, so hopefully it won't come out hollywoodized. They kept the age of the children, casting Chloe Moetz as Abby (not a huge fan of the name change, as it removes certain mystery), who recently played Hit Girl in the Kick Ass flick.

That being said, I still don't think it NEEDED a remake. The first one is so wonderful. One of my favorites in the last 5 years.

Watched this last night, what a great ride!

2009 movie I never heard of until Netflix put it in front of me. Sam Rockwell stars and crushes it. Great twist which I did catch before the reveal.  A film that shows great stuff can be done on a low budget.  Boilerplate summary:


I looked for it here, so if it has been talked about, forgive me.

It was!  http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17304.0

I realized Spotify has the soundtrack: http://open.spotify.com/album/3VFByhqH5Qo5TROwAqtAVK

I am sssssssssssssloooow. Just picked this up. Liked it immensley.

I'm glad they didn't go all HAL on GERTY, but I'm wondering why the company wouldn't.

I went through most of the clone stuff expecting it to be the dying hallucinations of the real Sam croaking out in the wreck.

I thought Sam Rockwell should have been nominated for an Oscar. I'm a big fan though.

Good mov (I call movies "movs" now.  Deal with it).

I got the feeling that they kind of gave a nod to HAL, in that GERTY was given partially contradicting goals: Assure Sam's well-being and don't tell him about all the secrets around him. Only this time, the AI reconciled those goals by discreetly nudging Sam to where he could find the solution by himself.

In my head, I waved it away thinking that the near pods were fully grown and nearly ready clones, and the further you go down the hall, the less developed the clone is. so the ones furthest away would be embyos and eventually just clusters of cells. Each clone, if they can't force age them, would need 20something years to cook.

...

Wait. That doesn't match up with the time frame of the family. Scratch that last thought. They must force age them.

Meh, Bellisario's Maxim (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitleuvmtqrxe).

It drove me nuts that they moved as if there were Moon gravity while outside, but Earth gravity while inside. Imagine what ping pong would actually look like at 1/6 G, for example. Then I just accepted it and enjoyed the film.

Caught this on Netflix. I thought it was terrific--when Rockwell manages to call home the enormity of what's been done really hit me like a freight train, that idea that you'd willingly allow some version of yourself to be consigned to that was both emotionally devastating and totally plausible. All sorts of fascinating connections to the real-life story laid out in the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, for anyone who has read that.

I don't remember anywhere in the movie where it's pointed out that ur-Rockwell was in on it.

I also assumed it was done without his knowledge...

I thought it was a bit ambiguous and could go either way, but the headlines at the end indicating that the company got in trouble for their actions suggest that using clones for cheap labor is not an accepted business practice in the world of the movie.

Would YOU do it to yourself knowingly ?

No, but on multiple occasions I have been accused of being a freakishly morally upstanding human being, so I'm not a good example.  I can pretty easily see a normal person signing a release for the unlimited use of his DNA and memories if he needed the money and never had to see the result.

See, I thought it was perfectly possible he knew it had been done. And that possibility is emotionally devastating because it's plausible. Say you're an engineer, you work for a company, they say, "Look we value your abilities and your expertise, we'd like to find a way to make more extensive use of your skills in a high-risk context. So, what we'd like to do is clone you. The clones will stay on the Moon, they'll never know what they are, and you'll be extremely handsomely compensated. Imagine it's like donating blood, and you're right on target". We all think, "No way would I do that." Think first, what if the compensation was very good? Think second, what if it was implied that this was a necessary condition of continued profitable employment. Think third, we already sometimes give away things from our bodies and think nothing more of what comes of it. Or we do think, in the case of adoption, and yet still do it. People working for the government sometimes give assent to their work being used in ways that are almost certainly going to be unethical, but they go ahead and allow it or acquiese to it.

It's possible. It's upsetting. It's interesting. Which adds up to superior speculative fiction.

Nope, sorry, I reject that utterly.

I'd do it, if I needed the money/job and was desperate enough. I don't think he did, though. I am not nearly as selfless a person.

Dear God.

See, you're the type of person they put in Clone Movies - Because your clone feels the same way and tries to kill you, leading to Enormous Tension and a Box Office Winner !!!

Me, all you'd get in a clone movie is the wife getting multi'd.

I thought the original guy knew, I suspected the wife knew too so she would have helped to record more videos for unexpected events.  But I'll have to watch it again now with an open mind.

If somebody offered me a million bucks, I'd be sorely tempted.

The company might have given him a good sell, on the cost of transporting people back and forth, the nature of the clones, and how the clones are treated, and the guy might have really needed the money.

We know, in hindsight, how shitty a setup it turned out, but original Sam might not.

I think if he willingly submitted to be cloned there would be a much greater chance of the clones realizing what was going on. Wouldn't the clones' memories include the memory of agreeing to cloning and make them more suspicious of oddities? Unless they were taking tissue samples before he agreed to it or they were manipulating the clones' memories to not include that part.

AFAIK a clone in RL is just a copy of the creature's DNA. It wouldn't have any memories at all of the donor.
In order to have a functioning person clone, they'd have to have some kind of memory implantation thing, which is sorta backed up by GERTY when it tests a new clone to see if it's ready to go to work. The memory implant would have to include some fabrications and omissions so the clones think they're the real Sam.

It's more explicit than that, and actually implies a lot of humanity for the robot.

Necro! Just watched this again. So great, so great.

My theory about the original Sam is that Sam did do a real three-year contract, then went back to Earth. Meanwhile, the company was producing clones (memories and all) and then reused all the footage from that original period for all the future clones of Sam, saying the com link was down.

Basically, they kept replaying the three years of the original Sam over and over. The clones wake up about a week into that original period, to ensure the environment is as new to them as it would have been to the original Sam, yet they wouldn't experience staying longer than three years. They don't even have to tamper with his memory to achieve this, because the only thing the new clone has experienced that the original Sam didn't is the "accident", which didn't happen and can be easily rationalized as brief memory loss.

Between clones, they removed all signs of prolonged inhabitation (writing et c.) from the previous Sam(n), so that Sam(n+1) wouldn't recognize himself having been there. Note how the company had placed recreational equipment that Sam has no prior experience of, so that he wouldn't be able to recognize his own work or customization of it, since that too would give away his "previous" stay.

I'm sticking to my guns on this one after a rewatch. It's plausible that the original knew he'd been cloned. Or that he'd given a vague ok for a procedure that he didn't want to know more about. The latter particularly is completely in line with things that have actually happened already in the real world--doctors and companies that have sweet-talked people into giving samples or materials where much later the donors have said that they didn't really understand what was going to be done with what they donated.

It's very possible Sam(0) knew, it's impossible to absolutely infer from the movie as far as I can tell.

However, while I'd buy into the company cajoling Sam into agreeing, convincing the wife to record video messages to the clones is stretching it a little far to me. She wasn't an actress as far as we know and even if she were, even cloned Sam would be able to tell she was acting. The only solution to the tapes that I see is that they were real at some point, which means Sam(0) must have been the recipient at that point.

You can go with the whole "they engineered his memory!" idea but it just strikes me as clunky since they could just have engineered the whole thing, rather than take risks and base the clones on a real person. Why go through all that trouble if they could get it all for free?

Why go to all the trouble at all? It has been said somewhere in this thread I'm sure. But paying some mook to be a dirt farmer for three years at a bit has got to be cheaper than engineering this whole cloning and cover-up program, the dude didn't seem to have any particularly high end skills. I'll grant you that would rather defeat the purpose of the movie though.

Several possibilities:

1. Transportation costs are prohibitive. Launching from the Moon is cheap, but Earth's gravity makes it considerably less so.
2. Training costs are prohibitive, as well as the costs of keeping alternates on standby.
3. In case of any injury or accident, another clone can be awoken with only a day's delay instead of a week-long trip
4. In the early days of the project, many of the prospects cracked, further increasing costs... for whatever reason, Sam didn't. Also he never objected to conditions or asked uncomfortable questions. He was just what they'd been looking for.

In general, the answer is scaling. We don't see them but there are probably several bases like the one our Sam is in, and all of them have their own supply of Sams. All those worry-free three-year tours keep things simple.

It just doesn't make sense, within the setting, besides "evil corporation is evil". 
- The very stuff Sam is mining cracked the energy problem with getting to the moon. 
- Three year solo shifts don't make sense.  Any large plant would need a team of dedicated repairmen to stay operational, from just ordinary wear and tear.  You need a regular supply of replacement parts as well, which means you need regular transport.
- Brand new clones don't make sense.  You lose all of the skills and knowledge built up in Sam for a brand new guy.  Also, the upkeep behind keeping a sterile clone facility (not to mention getting it there) must be fucking ludicrous.
- If you have AI robots, why do you need a clone?  Especially as most of what Sam does is monitor from a panel and simple repairs, as the thing is automated anyway. 


It's like trying to find a sane reason for the evil Company's behavior in Alien/Aliens.  Sure, the message to divert makes sense in the original....  but potentially sacrificing a huge load of cargo and a deepspace ship over something you have no idea about?  And if they expend the crew, how does the ship make it back with your repairmen, pilots, and navigators dead?  Not to mention, a giant multi-system company, the mining division is probably separate from the weapons division and there is no fucking way mining is going to damage their bottom line and careers to benefit those assholes in weapons....  and weapons is most likely to spend their money lobbying government for giant contracts supplying weapons for whatever the last war is and figuring out ways to go over budget.

It's like a major multi-national now reroutes an oil tanker so that they can infect the crew with a new strand of Ebola, so that they can bring it back for their germ warfare division.

Or Paul Reiser thinks while facing a last stand that the perfect thing to do is release face-huggers to impregnate the few remaining people standing between him and death?  Just fucking sneak that shit back on board when you evacuate, and jump someone from stasis to get a face-hugger on them if you are really inclined to be evil, but not suicidal.

Compare it to Outland.  That is basically a modern mining camp IN SPAAACE, which includes typical vice (drugs, prostitution, etc.)  The company are assholes, but in believable ways, with shoddy working conditions and treatment of labor and turning a blind eye as long as there are no major scandals and production stays up.  Even the badguys, who are more corrupt, just want to get a piece of the drug money while keeping production up... and they want the marshal to turn a blind eye.

To get the same level of stupid, the company itself would have to be force-drugging the entire workforce and be secretly building a giant death-laser... with no clear-cut plan on how they were going to profit from it.


Moon was a great movie, enjoyed it, but the whole set up is completely nonsensical... which is fine because it's about Sam and his character.

I think you misunderstood Alien a little.
 :awesome_for_real:

Just look at how many amazing advances we made in the area of corporations acting like total assholes over the last two decades. If that rate of change keeps up, then in 100 years Weyland-Yutani will look perfectly reasonable.

Reasonable?  They'll be liberal hippie treehuggers because they still let their employees think and breed at their discretion.

According to the story, it's cheaper/easier to clone Sam than to run replacements up every few years. I don't need to know the nickels and dimes to jump that hurdle and enjoy the movie.

What shoots that it's too expensive line in the ass is the response-time and size of the clean up crew.  There should be no human clean up crew, the AI should do the clean-up by tricking Sam into a disposal shoot.

I don't think they send a clean up crew unless there's a problem.

Corporations do occasionally do things that are crazy expensive that they talked themselves into believing were cheap. Or they do illicit things that are cheap and then talk themselves into expensive steps to protect the secret of what they did. When top executives are going to be personally liable or prosecutable over such secrets, the sky's the limit when it comes to trying to protect it, fuck what that does to the company's bottom line.