Moon

Wow, this was a good movie. I'm going to try really, really hard to keep this spoiler-free, since this movie is in limited release and very few people have had a chance to see it. (Oh, who am I kidding? I know Rich hasn't seen it and I don't know if Jonathan has yet, so I'm going to try very hard not to ruin anything for you guys, my two loyal readers!)

Moon is the story of corporate astronaut Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell), who's been stationed alone on a moonbase for a three-year contract. And as you'd expect, things start getting weird.

What makes Moon stand out is that not only does it have twists in the storyline, the story is not so much about the twists themselves and more about how Sam then has to deal with those twists. It's a movie where things that seem like nitpicks actually have reasons behind them. It's one of those great movies that gives you something to think about afterwards, as things that seemed to not make sense suddenly click into place.

And lastly, on a personal high note for me, is the special effects. While I love how realistic CGI looks these days, one of the things I don't like about it is it moves too fast, and you no longer get time to look at the small details. But in this movie, the moonbase exterior, the lunar rovers, everything about it has that classic model feel. I don't know how much of the effects were models vs CGI; there's very little model work done these days, so either this one actually used models or the CGI was deliberately treated to harken back to those classic days of 2001, Alien and other classics where the wonder wasn't so much in making things go boom but the feel of actually living in an alien environment.

By all means, if you get a chance to see Moon, don't miss it!