Moon: Movie Review

By: Benjamin Sussman

Posted: 3/2/10

In Moon, the film written and directed by Duncan Jones, we are confronted with several fundamental ethical issues. Sam Bell faces the alienation of being alone on a lunar station, completely isolated from earth by a faulty communications link. However, the reasons for this isolation are not as simple as being alone on the moon. It is also a story of betrayal, and of a corporate culture that has forsaken the sanctity and value of an individual human life.

Sam Bell is an employee contracted by Lunar Industries to extract helium-3 from lunar soil for clean fusion energy on Earth. He left behind his wife Tess, who is heavily pregnant with their daughter, Eve. He is stationed for three years at the largely automated Sarang lunar base with only a robotic assistant named GERTY 3000 for company. GERTY 3000 is the base's life support computer and robot whose role is that of keeping Sam safe. He is Sam's only humanoid contact on a daily basis until after his accident.

Indeed, Lunar Industries has perpetrated a convoluted lie about Sam Bell's contract. After a tragic accident, it is revealed that he has been cloned and is not coming home. The second Sam Bell, who is three years younger than the first, explains to the first Sam we met at the beginning of the movie the company's motive: "Look it's a company right, they have investors, shareholders, shit like that… What, what's cheaper, spending time and money training new personnel? Or you just have a couple of spares here to do the job. It's the far side of the moon! The cheap fucks haven't even fixed the communications satellite yet!" The corporation has placed their profits before all else, and the Sam Bell clones have been essentially relegated to drones, or cogs in the machine. They have been cut off from communicating with Earth in order to strip away their humanity. The messages they receive from Tess were actually prerecorded video messages meant to spur them to continue to work, hoping one day to make it home.

The original Sam Bell is back on earth with his daughter Eve. His consent makes him equally culpable in the false promise and treatment of someone who is essentially himself, but in a separate physical body. How little respect must one show to another human being to at least acknowledge that as a human, they have certain rights? Evidently he has more than the company has, as they send a rescue crew, not to save the Sam Bell working on the Lunar Base, but rather to fix the damaged helium-3 harvester as this will affect their profits. Lunar Industries wants to rid themselves of the liability that something could compromise their business. The two Sams understand that if they are both found together, they will be killed. The first is already nearing the end of his engineered lifespan and is dying. That is another cruel and unusual punishment that Lunar Industries imposes on their employees: the standard procedure at the end of their contract involves incinerating the clone while telling them "Annyeonghikyeseyo," which is Korean for "good-bye," but only if the speaker is leaving and the listener is remaining put. It should therefore be more accurately construed as "you're not going anywhere." Sam elects to return to the damaged rover in order for the second Sam to have the chance to escape and live his life out on earth. In the end, Lunar Industries is exposed by the escaped clone of Sam Bell as having trapped, employed, and treated as slaves many cloned copies of himself.

This movie evokes the classic struggle for identity, particularly when Sam has to come to grips with the fact that he wasn't who he had believed himself to be. On top of this struggle for identity, we are faced with the question of the value of human life, and whether or not it would be proper to place our continual desire for more and more energy ahead of the rights of the individual. Also, are clones truly human, or are they just a genetic abnormality? I believe that because of the deception perpetrated by the company, they were mistreated horribly. The movie makes us think about any form of exploitation for the sake of profit, and how that could be reined in. Surely it would be nice if we were all heroes with courage and decency like Sam Bell. But what if we aren't?