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Moon

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Moon

I was alerted to this movie last week thru an Idlethumbs tweet and checked out the trailer. The trailer made this movie feel exactly like Solaris, which I didn't care much for, but since I'm a sci-fi fiend, I went to watch it anyway.

It was great. The trailer was misleading, but I won't say why for fear of spoilers. Moon is just a well paced movie with a haunting score (another one by Clint Mansell) and it gave me something to think about after the movie was over.

Don't come into the theater thinking you'll see an action packed movie with tons of special effects. It's more of a thinking-type sci fi than a lasers and space battles sci fi.

The only thing I was a little unsure of was the Kevin Spacey robot. His facial expressions were hilarious and cute, but it was too much Kevin Spacey and not enough robot.

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Moon

Looking forward to this too. I don't think it's fair that us UK types have to wait an extra month to see it. Hmph.

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DAMMIT I really want to see Moon, but none of the cinemas in Brighton are showing it. Fuck you cinemas, fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu!

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DAMMIT I really want to see Moon, but none of the cinemas in Brighton are showing it. Fuck you cinemas, fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu!

(There are downsides to living in Brighton?!)

Aw, I want to see Moon too! There are loads of places in London showing it, but I'm not sure if I have the time this week. Might need some drastic planning.

In other news, I saw the new Pedro Almodovar film the other day, Broken Embraces / Los abrazos rotos. Really wonderful, enjoyable film. Very eclectic and cheeky in its melding of genres and styles, but still consistent and masterful in its gelling of direction, cinematography and acting. Plus, wow, Penelope Cruz.

Definitely recommended - just a joy to watch something so intelligently and artfully made, that isn't willfully obscure, difficult or abrasive.

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DAMMIT I really want to see Moon, but none of the cinemas in Brighton are showing it. Fuck you cinemas, fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu!

I had to make a trip to Richmond to see it, but I enjoyed myself. I'm not sure it quite lived up to some of the praise it's been getting, but it was definitely a refreshing change from all the blockbuster dross I've been subjecting myself to recently. Good stuff (just not amazing stuff).

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I enjoyed Moon as well. Probably the third best film I've seen this year.

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I hope the Premier allows this film to be shown in my country. It sounds pretty awesome.

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Moon was very enjoyable, and, as an added bonus, it has Matt Berry in it! :tup:

I saw his name in the credits, then completely forgot about it, so I didn't spot him.

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I went along to see Moon last week, it was the small screen at the Odeon in Covent Garden, but was great to see the screening had sold out. I'd unfortunately watched the trailer before hand, taken the bullet for the rest of my friends who I quickly warned, so came into it with certain expectations. Without giving too much away I imagined it was going to be one of those 'is this real or all in his mind' type movies and was a little disappointed by how straight the story played out. I think I would have preferred a touch more ambiguity in the end. Sam Rockwell was bloody fantastic though and the miniatures were great to see in film again.

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I went along to see Moon last week, it was the small screen at the Odeon in Covent Garden, but was great to see the screening had sold out. I'd unfortunately watched the trailer before hand, taken the bullet for the rest of my friends who I quickly warned, so came into it with certain expectations. Without giving too much away I imagined it was going to be one of those 'is this real or all in his mind' type movies and was a little disappointed by how straight the story played out. I think I would have preferred a touch more ambiguity in the end. Sam Rockwell was bloody fantastic though and the miniatures were great to see in film again.

Coming into it with no knowledge of the plot whatsoever, I still felt the same way you did right as the twist was revealed, but that feeling quickly dissipated for me in the face of Rockwell's amazing performance(s). I ended up really liking how frequently the movie did the opposite of what you'd expect a sci-fi movie of this sort to do.

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I really liked that

you never actually see the 'real' Sam, just hear his voice off camera at one stage.

It's certainly one of those films that the more I think about it the more I love it and agree that its strength was going off in its own direction, being able to free itself from the trappings the familiar setup may have put upon it. Bold stuff.

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The weird thing about Moon was how eager it was to show you all its cards. It had things that seemed like they'd be twists or mysteries, but it didn't really beat about the bush with explaining everything. I think it was OK, though, since there wasn't much fanfare around the revelations, so it's not like they were trying for it and missed; it just didn't match my expectations of how a plot like that would be told (I make no judgement one way or the other on how it should be told).

I thought the ending was a bit flat, but on the whole it was pretty good (as I said before).

I kind of expected it to be further down the chain of repetition, heightening the isolation thing (finding out that the world you remember leaving is long gone), and I think I would have liked that more, but I'm not sure there's an objective reason to take things in that direction. Also, that would clearly be ripping off Futurama.

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The 'flat' ending still hasn't be completely reconciled in my brainhole, maybe because my imagination is still trying to continue the story. One of the devices I thought worked well was the overlay of future images and past sounds and vice versa (such as Sam's voice saying "I'm going to go out and take a look" overlapping short scenes of him putting on his space suit, approaching his Lunar Rover). Then at the end

you have a very brief burst of dialogue coming from Earth as Sam approaches inside the energy container craft, future echoes of radio/TV broadcasts regarding his presence there. At least that's how I read it. I like to think that one of the Sam's was able to break free of his predetermined fate, even if the end result wasn't the one he was created to long for. Retaining the mystery of what sort of place Earth has become in this future, the questions the final seconds leave you with, is just enough to off set the films overall matter-of-fact story telling.

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I really liked that Moon played it pretty straight rather than having a bunch of twists everybody expected and that had already been seen in a ton of movies and other scifi.

I couldn't finish Antichrist. I really liked the first hour and a half, but decided to walk out pretty quickly when the brutality ramps up suddenly.

Now, I could probably take pretty intense gore, but when the wife was walking to the woods naked holding a tool, the past scenes had been very gory and having heard the movie might include a scene I wasn't hoping to see, I decided not to fight my embarrassment and walked out.

Ginger, would you mind giving me a run-down of what happens in the end?

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I found moon very pleasant with a good soundtrack, I didn't find it compelling and didn't get sense of the exploration of loneliness i was expecting (which is probably a good thing.)

@brkl

I'm not entirely sure where u got to as I can't recall that specific scene. is it just after she attached the weight to his leg?

If it is; she goes off and throws the wrench under the house and wonders off, he wakes up and starts trying to crawl away, he gets quite far. She discovers he is gone and searches for him, shouting for him to return, he hears her and hides in a fox hole. While in the hole he searches and finds a crow (that represents despair) it looks dead, he touches it and it begins to squawk he repeatedly tries to beat it to death in order to silence it, but fails. She locates him and traps him in the hole while trying to get him out, she then starts to dig him out, he nearly suffocated by her collapsing the fox, but she gets him out and seems remorseful and close to sanity again. She takes him back to the house and I'm slight etchy on the order of events here, but she gets aroused again and gets him to start masturbating her, he stops and asks her if she is going to kill him she says that she has to wait for the three beggars to arrive before someone can die. She goes and gets some scissors and performs a circumcision on herself. She goes and lies down in a semi-conscious state while he realises that there is no such star consolation as the three beggars (flashing back to the star chart he saw in the loft) . He hears the crow squawk under the house and breaks the floor board to find the wrench and starts trying to detach the weight from his leg. While she is lying down the deer, fox and crow go and lie with her, he manages to undo the weight and she jumps out and attacks him with the scissors, he overpowers her and strangles her to death. It is then the epilogue which is shot in the same style and with the same music as the prologue, u see him hobbling through all the scenes that she went through when she was imagining the woods (but in reverse order and going the other direction) and then he eats some berries gets to the top of a hill and looks down where there are hundreds of faceless women walking up the hill towards him.

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Thank you, all, for the judicious use of the spoiler tag. I'm hoping to see Moon imminently, so appreciate the discretion.

Away from the cinema, I'm on the 7th episode of Ergo Proxy and am completely hooked on it. Long, long time since I watched any anime, but this is about as great a return as I could want. Interesting story, great characters and a really nice art direction and production style.

I'm watching a couple of episodes a day at the moment, usually in bed. :shifty:

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Thanks, Ginger. I might brave the movie (on DVD) at some point to get the full picture. Or not.

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Thank you, all, for the judicious use of the spoiler tag. I'm hoping to see Moon imminently, so appreciate the discretion.

The funny thing is that, whilst there are things you find out throughout the course of it, I don't think it's a film that relies on surprising you to be entertaining. I think ideally I'd like to come to all films completely fresh (the problem with that being how to decide what to see), and perhaps this is more sensitive to spoilers than the average film, but its quality isn't based on smart-arse twists.

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The funny thing is that, whilst there are things you find out throughout the course of it, I don't think it's a film that relies on surprising you to be entertaining. I think ideally I'd like to come to all films completely fresh (the problem with that being how to decide what to see), and perhaps this is more sensitive to spoilers than the average film, but its quality isn't based on smart-arse twists.

I've recently become particularly evasive when it comes to trailers, because I think that the majority of them give away the first 40 minutes of the film in question.

I think with Moon, although I've got some vague whiff that there's a twist, or more to it than meets the eye, it's more that I want to go in with the majority of my knowledge being 'it's called Moon, and it's got Sam Rockwell in a space suit in it'. So even the vague nuts-and-bolts of the setting and so on are still quite unknown to me.

And the pre-release marketing for films have now become so important, especially where geeks are concerned, that little is left 'unspoiled' in certain circles - you have script reviews, preview clips, etc, as well as trailers.

I guess I'm trying to recapture the vague, silly notion I have that, when Alien, 2001 or Psycho were released, people were actually shocked/surprised by the actual content of the film, as opposed to just the twists and turns of the narrative (ie if they'd only seen the poster and 'In space no-one can hear you scream').

I don't mean to sound idiotically (and falsely, being born after all those films mentioned above were released) nostalgic, but when the majority of films released are remakes, sequels, or adaptations, it's hard to be totally surprised by a film. ('Shit! You mean Transformers is about robots fighting, Wolverine is about mutant Canadians, and Harry Potter V is about (the) wizards?).

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Finally got a chance to see Moon and liked it very much. I now get what people meant when they described it as, "good old fashioned/proper sci-fi."

Unlike most blockbuster sci-fi, Moon feels very much like you're watching a novel. The pacing, intimacy and story progression is acutely pitched and very steadily paced; there are no jarring leaps of "4 months later" or anything like that, which shows confidence and I really liked it for that.

Sam Rockwell is also completely engrossing throughout, drawing the film along very well with no reliance on effects or trickery to add any superficial perception of plot or character depth.

Very good film indeed, but not sure it's something I'd watch again and enjoy as much. Whereas District 9 I've seen twice now and, if anything, enjoyed it even more the second time. But Moon is excellent regardless--make an effort to see it if you already haven't.

Edit: Skimming the previous posts, I've just realised that I've not watched anything on TV regularly (and to series completion) since BSG finished. Maybe it's time I finally get around to watching Babylon 5 properly...

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Watched Moon yesterday and was very impressed. One of the best science fiction movies I have ever seen and I don't even watch those things.

One scene disappointed me in an interesting way though:

At some point Sam finds one of the communications jammers. After standing in front of it for a while, staring at that unfair thing, he starts to feel physically ill and even cough blood. Now, I assumed this was because of the intense electromagnetic radiation from the jammer on his body.

For some reason I liked the thought a lot. It would have been nicely symbolic as well. However, I quickly found out that

Sam was (mainly?) just getting old.

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As for 'Moon', I don't get it. It seemed to blow its load early on and spend the rest of the running time cleaning it up. It didn't help that it was as predictable and clichéd as they come. I'm sure I've seen a variation of this story about half-a-dozen times now in other sci-fi films, it just felt so familiar and predictable all the way through that it somewhat tempered my enjoyment. Still it wasn't a bad film, and like Sunshine (with it's ending), I'll be able to look past it in repeated viewings... over, and over again.

I think you perhaps did miss the point. The exact reason it revealed the "twist" so early is because that story has been done before. If it saved it up to the end, M Night Shylaman style, the film would indeed be totally predictable and cliché.

Instead, like all the best golden age scifi, the film concentrates on exploring the human after-effects of the twist. The 'cleaning up' is the point, not that anything gets cleaner.

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