Note: here be spoilers, and you really don't want to be spoiled on this one.
Moon is a great little film. It's not perfect. It kind of runs out of steam in the third act, and pads around a bit to get to feature length, but it is that rare thing in Hollywood: well written and thoughtful. And like anything worth watching, I know it's good because I can't get it out of my head. And the more I think about it, the more I like it.
What I'm currently thinking about it is that it might be the most important sci-fi work since The Invisble Man, in terms of what it says about the genre and where it is. Well, at least in terms of film sci-fi, I admit I don't read a lot of sf. I don't read a lot of anything. This is Stevie on TV, after all. Anyway, here's why:
SF, like most genres, owes much to its ancestors and originators, and it's always struck me that they are particularly Victorian works, built on ideas of the 19th century. I think it's almost impossible to make a modernised Dr Jekyll, for example, because we simply don't have the same clear sense of moral and immoral any more, not as deeply held social taboos. Our Mr Hyde would probably just pollute, eat whales and vote Republican, and Dennis Leary already did that gag. But the real point is, the works of science is the enemy. Frankenstein's Monster is a Monster, Hyde is monstrous, so is Dr Griffin, the invisible man. Indeed, science itself is often what makes them monstrous - it is Jekyll's mad pusuit for his chemical that makes him experiment on himself, Dr Griffin's invisibility forces him to control others to get what he needs (which is more research). Science is tincture of mercury, to mix with it is to go mad.
What's more, science was also the gateway to the Other, to the spiritual. Conan Doyle believed fairies could be caught by the science of photography. Jekyll reveals the inner demons of the soul, Frankenstein creates life and learns what it is to be God (or at least, Prometheus, a demigod), the inventor of the Time Machine is thrown into an eden-like world with a kind of angels and demons. In the derivative works of the pulps, of course, science is simply the rabbit-hole to the fantastic, and just as with fantasy, this is often a playground for some kind of morality, and always the field of the supernatural.
The thing is, fast forward fifty years to Asimov and Clarke and things still haven't changed very much. Asimov likes robots but he writes a lot about societies that fear or hate them. And even where there is less of the devil, God is still very much in the machine: Clarke makes his aliens godlike in their science and their names (the Ramans, for example). Dick fears cyborgs even while he wants to have sex with them, seeing them as a kind of living lie, like memory alteration. It is uncharitable but not entirelty inaccurate to view SF as a history of boogeymen in different masks: we traded a fear of robots and cyborgs for a fear of snow crashes, grey goo and of course, the Singularity (which is kind of a robotic grey goo, two fears for the price of one).
Which is not to say SF is a bleak genre, although, since it is typically a kind of satire, it is rarely very upbeat. Star Trek is of course the flagship of science bringing moral rectitude to the world, or at least, the two going hand in hand - but even it ran into gods and demons in space, and, for all their talk of going boldly, more than once destroyed or ran from the things their science uncovered, or devices they felt man was not ready for.
Of course, Moon does end up with science revealing man's evil - the existence of cloning is what allows Sam to be abused. But what I like about it is that it totally rejects the traditional storyline of such stories, which is basically one of fear. The clone is typically a doppelganger, a goatee'd thing of evil, and must ask questions about good and evil, or the existence of a soul. But Moon destroys these ideas and embraces a completely different kind of spirituality by basically ignoring any spiritual questions. Sam is Sam is Sam. They all remember the same things so they are all the same guys, within and without. They do come to blows but one must not be destroyed for the other to live, this is not another tale of man's duality or schizophrenia. Sam is friends with himself; looks after himself; saves himself. This is man's humanity to man writ large as man's humanity to himself.
And that's unexpected - but not unnatural. We've been conditioned, I think, to fear what science will do to society and to us, and sometimes there just isn't evidence for it. There was a famous article about a robotic device designed to detect landmines by walking across the field. The clever AI meant that whatever combination of legs the device lost, it would find a way to keep moving forward. When a test was shown to the general, he demanded its end when the thing was crawling forward on one last leg. When asked why, he said it was "inhumane". So many stories revolve around us fearing robots but the truth is I don't think we will. Oppress, maybe, but like we oppress dogs, we won't do it with fear. Again, Moon follows this pattern: the robot is not Pinocchio or the Tin Man, it doesn't want to be human. It's not Frankenstein, turning on its creator. It's not a false image pretending to be human, nor do we wonder if it has a soul, because there is no need. GERTY proves itself human enough through its actions - it's a friend, and that's what matters. Moon again deliberately dodges the question (while also messing with your expectations).
(This, by the way, was another problem with Avatar - it seemed to be written for an audience who had never seen Cameron's very own Aliens, who weren't aware of its genre-defining conventions and rules. Not that it had to follow them but it should have acknowledged them. Moon on the other hand knows you think the robot is going to turn evil, because it thinks you've seen one or two other films in your life, and it plays with that.)
Probably the most interesting spiritual reversal of Moon is of course, in the heavens themselves. In a deliberate image reference to the moon above us on earth, earth hangs gilded and mysterious above Sam's world. And it is his heaven, his reprieve and his loved ones. So very, very many films have positioned the spiritual in space, either metaphorically or even literally - Solaris and Contact have our dead relatives out there, Event Horizon finds the literal Hell, Kirk found iconoclasm he could punch. But Sam finds nothing but himself on the Moon, and his spirituality remains on Earth. Idealised, yes, but on the other hand not turned into a magical place ONLY because it is the cradle of humanity (I always thought Aliens 4 was wrong-headed for trying to make me care about aliens being loose on earth, because there was no reason in any of the films to suggest earth really mattered to anyone any more). No, Sam's heaven is not manufactured nor is it even very spiritual, it is flesh and blood and people. In Solaris and Contact we went into space and found aliens were our dead relatives and maybe god or heaven. In Moon, we go back to earth and find heaven is our flesh and blood sons and daughters, right where we left them.
There are of course movies which have suggested that space (and/or science) changes nothing about basic humanity but even they tend to end up singing the song that mankind takes his inherent inhumanity into space with him, poisoning even the heavens with his sin. Moon tells us that man takes his basic HUMANITY with him into space, and it is not phased by robots or clones or the far distances between. He finds no gods or demons, just himself, and he's a being of love, and all he needs.
So here then is science fiction for the new millennium, freed at last of our Victorian fears and mysticism. No longer afraid of what science may do to us or not do to us, or what we may do with science, and no longer hiding from demons carried by us into heaven or the gods found lurking therein. It's an inspiring film that is truly humanist and truly human - and proud of it.
