Moon

SciFi cinema like this is rarely seen these days. Moon is not an action space movie, but an exploration of reality in a future that is distant, but not so distant that it is impossible to imagine. In fact, the flavor of this film reminded me of reading a classic SciFi short story. [aside] go read Flatland by Edwin Abbott right now! [end aside] The closest comparison in (my) recent memory is Solaris and even that got kind of creepy in the end. Here we have a vision of the future where people have made different ethical choices than we might make, along with a treatment of how these choices affect both society and the individual. For plot, Sam Bell is a lunar miner whose outpost is on the far side of the moon. He is finishing a 3-year contract to maintain and monitor the machinery which extracts Helium-3 from the lunar soil and ships it back to earth for its fusion reactors. Having lost "live-feed" contact with the earth, his entire communication is via delayed messages and his entire life is spent interacting with himself and his HAL-like buddy Gerty. If it sounds average and a bit slow, all I can say is that the beauty of the film is that with this simple plot, it isn't.
5-stars