Moon

[MuffinMan]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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.

[pxib]

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

[Tarami]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Tarami]

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?

[Ragnoros]

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.

[pxib]

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.

[Johny Cee]

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.

[Ironwood]

I think you misunderstood Alien a little.
 

[cironian]

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.

[Merusk]

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

[Ratman_tf]

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.

[Typhon]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.