upon wrongdoers is to risk losing our own sense of right and wrong. In Foster’s novelization, the captain goes on to say in his speech:
“We are gathered here to pay our respects to fallen friends and family. We take solace in the knowledge that we honor those who lost their lives doing what they believed was right. And no matter what path they took, we hope that in death they can find forgiveness.” (Simon & Schuster)
That is something I fear we may be hard-pressed to find in the Western world, even twelve long years after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. To forgive is such a foreign concept to us. And yet in a sense, sealing Harrison away in cryostasis is a sign that we’re somehow, as Kirk would put it, getting better —but as a nation whose deep-seated ideologies stem from the war crimes and bomb scares and genocides of the twentieth century? Well, we still have so very far to go.
I applaud the filmmakers and studio heads at Paramount and Bad Robot not only for being willing to admit this, that our collective kind hasn’t quite learned to forgive and get along with one another, but also for having the fullness of vision to dedicate the movie and its bold message to those brave souls who have served among U.S. and NATO Coalition forces in the wake of that single, unforgettable morning that shook the innocence from our once-great nation forever.
Alone on the Moon
Looking Back at Duncan Jones’s Directorial Debut
I’m sitting with a group of friends in the Seminary Street Pub, familiar faces here and there casting shadows upon near-forgotten memories, making plain the slippery nature of time and life. Red neon lights drench the dark paint of the walls. I watch my last beer swirl, dizzying, half-gone, inside a green glass bottle as I peel off the metallic label. . . .
After we went to dinner, my fiancée suggested we skip out on Iron Man 3 . There’s always tomorrow, she pointed out—and quite rightly. Hell. We can always watch Silver Linings Playbook at home. True, true.
Days later, I’m still thinking about Duncan Jones’s Moon anyway. About the column I was supposed to write half a week ago. Loneliness fostered by distance and time and sheer solitude.
One can only imagine how it must feel to live alone on the Moon.
Sam Rockwell’s performance—performances?—may be the closest we’ll ever come to knowing for sure. Certainly I wouldn’t advocate for some lone maintenance man patrolling a lunar harvesting field, digging up barrels of helium-3 and firing them off toward home. How long before you’d break? Before you’d be willing to take your life’s work, and just overturn it all?
Rockwell’s character, Sam Bell, represents the best in science fiction cinema. He’s a curious little man, childlike in both his ignorance and curiosity; he dares to challenge that which he finds suspicious or otherwise dissatisfactory.
Through his stumbling about, watching his mirror image deteriorate before his very eyes and then seeking to unleash knowledge upon an unsuspecting, corporate-dominated world . . . we expect and demand great things of him. We feel the pain of his loss as he realizes that he’s lost his wife already, even before he was born—and as it dawns on him that he’ll only last for the three brief years it takes to fulfill his “contract.”
Such is the curse of the blue-collar man in today’s world. We are obliged to spend so much of our precious lives on the clock, toiling in the midst of some great machinery at once incomprehensible but also quite basic. Inching our overlords toward some fabled bottom line.
But I think the gift of Jones’s quiet science fiction film may be the sense of hope, of justice , that is to be grasped from the larger tragedy of the working individual’s life amid tedium.
We have those rare opportunities to expose indiscretions, and to show the world what profit-obsessed institutions are capable of inflicting on human
“We are gathered here to pay our respects to fallen friends and family. We take solace in the knowledge that we honor those who lost their lives doing what they believed was right. And no matter what path they took, we hope that in death they can find forgiveness.” (Simon & Schuster)
That is something I fear we may be hard-pressed to find in the Western world, even twelve long years after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. To forgive is such a foreign concept to us. And yet in a sense, sealing Harrison away in cryostasis is a sign that we’re somehow, as Kirk would put it, getting better —but as a nation whose deep-seated ideologies stem from the war crimes and bomb scares and genocides of the twentieth century? Well, we still have so very far to go.
I applaud the filmmakers and studio heads at Paramount and Bad Robot not only for being willing to admit this, that our collective kind hasn’t quite learned to forgive and get along with one another, but also for having the fullness of vision to dedicate the movie and its bold message to those brave souls who have served among U.S. and NATO Coalition forces in the wake of that single, unforgettable morning that shook the innocence from our once-great nation forever.
Alone on the Moon
Looking Back at Duncan Jones’s Directorial Debut
I’m sitting with a group of friends in the Seminary Street Pub, familiar faces here and there casting shadows upon near-forgotten memories, making plain the slippery nature of time and life. Red neon lights drench the dark paint of the walls. I watch my last beer swirl, dizzying, half-gone, inside a green glass bottle as I peel off the metallic label. . . .
After we went to dinner, my fiancée suggested we skip out on Iron Man 3 . There’s always tomorrow, she pointed out—and quite rightly. Hell. We can always watch Silver Linings Playbook at home. True, true.
Days later, I’m still thinking about Duncan Jones’s Moon anyway. About the column I was supposed to write half a week ago. Loneliness fostered by distance and time and sheer solitude.
One can only imagine how it must feel to live alone on the Moon.
Sam Rockwell’s performance—performances?—may be the closest we’ll ever come to knowing for sure. Certainly I wouldn’t advocate for some lone maintenance man patrolling a lunar harvesting field, digging up barrels of helium-3 and firing them off toward home. How long before you’d break? Before you’d be willing to take your life’s work, and just overturn it all?
Rockwell’s character, Sam Bell, represents the best in science fiction cinema. He’s a curious little man, childlike in both his ignorance and curiosity; he dares to challenge that which he finds suspicious or otherwise dissatisfactory.
Through his stumbling about, watching his mirror image deteriorate before his very eyes and then seeking to unleash knowledge upon an unsuspecting, corporate-dominated world . . . we expect and demand great things of him. We feel the pain of his loss as he realizes that he’s lost his wife already, even before he was born—and as it dawns on him that he’ll only last for the three brief years it takes to fulfill his “contract.”
Such is the curse of the blue-collar man in today’s world. We are obliged to spend so much of our precious lives on the clock, toiling in the midst of some great machinery at once incomprehensible but also quite basic. Inching our overlords toward some fabled bottom line.
But I think the gift of Jones’s quiet science fiction film may be the sense of hope, of justice , that is to be grasped from the larger tragedy of the working individual’s life amid tedium.
We have those rare opportunities to expose indiscretions, and to show the world what profit-obsessed institutions are capable of inflicting on human
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