(2009) The Earth has been rehabilitated from its environmentally destructive reliance on fossil fuels with the development of clean, fusion energy. On the far side of the Moon, the commercial corporation LUNAR has established a base, named Sarang, with a single employee, contracted for three years to oversee the mining operation, which uses four Harvesters (named after the four Gospels) to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, drive out in a rover to collect the canisters when they have been filled with the gas, and then launch them by capsule to Earth for fueling the fusion power plants.

With two weeks left in his contract, astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is eager to return home, having no one to talk to other than the base's robot GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), with its yellow smiley face. He watches TV programs from the '60s and listens to rock'n'roll songs.

Sam can't communicate directly with Earth because the Lunar Sat has been down for some time, resulting in all communications having to be routed via Jupiter. He receives time-delayed video instructions from corporate headquarters and messages from his wife Tess (Dominique McElliogott) and then replies.

Distracted by a hallucination of a woman, he scalds his hand while making coffee; at night he imagines his wife making love to him in bed. In the rover he's distracted again, crashing and receiving a serious injury. He awakes in the infirmary back at Sarang. How did he get back to the base?

GERTY runs tests on Sam, determining his having suffered some brain damage with memory loss and logic impairment. Overhearing GERTY's having a live, direct communication with the corporation and informed that he's been denied permission to go outside until the rescue vehicle Eliza arrives, Sam tricks GERTY ("I'm here to keep you safe, Sam. I'm here to help you.") into allowing him to go outside to check the external shell for possible micrometeorite damage.

Returning to the crash site, Sam finds someone in a spacesuit inside the disabled rover and brings him back to the base. In the infirmary he sees what appears to be himself, badly injured. "What's going on?" Convinced he, or they, are being manipulated and that the signals to and from Earth are being blocked, they search for answers to some mysteries. Inside Sam discovers a hidden room that reveals the biggest secret on the base. They come to the conclusion that one or both of them may soon be killed, unless they come up with a plan quickly.

With screenplay by Nathan Parker, director Duncan Jones's sci-fi thriller, from his own original story, of a lonely astronaut on a lunar base discovering he has or is a company clone, has obvious echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey; but its premise of a corporation's appearing to be doing the planet and its consumers much good while simultaneously treating human life as a cheap, replaceable commodity may resonate with today's unemployed while big corporations prosper at their expense.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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