TL;DR: Man, I really wish they made more movies like this. Amazing!
First off, I wanna say this: virtually every synopsis of this movie that I’ve read has said something about a plot twist.
Don’t go into this expecting a plot twist. Well, at least how we typically expect plot twists to be. The Usual Suspects
(hey, another Kevin Spacey movie)… that has a plot twist. This movie just has a very interesting plot.
That said, man, what a great movie Moon was! I had heard good things about it from… somewhere… and said “hey, I’ve
heard good things, Kevin Spacey, might as well”. You know, as one does.
Any rate, the movie is about the Moon. Duh. At some point in the future, the technology becomes available to start
harvesting Helium-3 from the moon to bring back for nuclear energy. To support this, a corporation sets up at least one
lunar base to handle the harvesting and send the fuel back to Earth. Manning the base is one person, and that person is
there on a three year contract.
Currently, Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is the worker and he’s only three weeks from the end of his contract. The
movie is about his life, his excitement to go home, and how he interacts with the station’s AI personal assistant GERTY,
voiced by Kevin Spacey. GERTY is a robot kinda similar to AUTO in WALL-E in that it is more or less mobile and
suspended from the ceiling. However, GERTY actually seems to “want” to help Sam, and seems to be concerned over him at
various points through the movie. So, much more “friendly” than AUTO.
See? GERTY is much more friendly than AUTO; he smiles!
Everything is going fairly well until Sam is in an accident while retrieving fuel from one of the harvesters. In the
aftermath, Sam notices some things which are… not quite right. The rest of the story is very thought-provoking and
intensely interesting, so I’m not going to tell you about them here.
In any case, I strongly recommend the movie! It was very entertaining, fun to get Kevin Spacey’s very dry voice being a
robot, and Sam Rockwell is very good in the role. It’s a surprise that the movie only had a $5 million budget; Duncan
Jones did a fantastic job of keeping costs down, using models instead of CGI and having a very small cast (the only
three characters are really Sam Bell, GERTY, and Tess Bell, Sam’s wife, though we get face time from probably four or
five more people). Hollywood, take note: this is how you do a good, fresh, not-superhero story on a small budget!