Few would believe this well-made sci-fi film cost only $5 million, let alone the directorial debut of Duncan Jones. All this is also thanks to the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike, a blessing in disguise Duncan recruited a group of top industry insiders at that time, and they offered a very cheap price, and the film was successfully completed. A film critic joked, "Duncan Jones used $10 to spend $100,000. Obama should let him be the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States and let him lead the people of the world out of the economic crisis. Let Duncan Jones be a The director is too talented."
The background of the story of "Moon" is set in the future 2035. The film explained the origin of the whole thing at the very beginning: the environmental crisis in the future world has become a shackle for the development of human civilization, the problem of energy shortage is urgent, and capitalists have begun to seek a way out and set their sights on the moon in outer space. The film's leading actor and the only protagonist, Sam Bell, is an astronaut sent by a capital company to the moon to perform an energy mining mission. On this distant planet, Sam is accompanied by only one intelligent machine named Currie.
In some western literary works, the image of "moon" often has special symbolic meaning. On the one hand, Artemis, the "crescent goddess" in Greek mythology, symbolizes virginity and purity; on the other hand, in the works of Shakespeare and others, the moon represents weirdness and evil. Duncan Jones may have exploited the double meaning of the month: it represents both hope and death.
During a mining operation, Sam had an unfortunate accident and was trapped inside the rover and was in a severe coma. When Sam wakes up, he finds himself lying on a bed in the base infirmary with no memory of the previous accident. While recovering, Sam discovers that something is wrong, and eventually finds another unconscious Sam on the rover that breaks down next to the energy harvester. At this point, the audience, like the old Sam in the movie, thinks that the new Sam must be a clone of the old Sam.
And the director's ingenuity is precisely reflected in the subsequent revealing of the broken-window effect. The old and new Sam gradually discovered that they were just two of the dozens of cloned Sams, and the real Sam had long since been sealed away in the underground space of the infirmary. The Capital Corporation used the pretext of returning to Earth after completing the mission, and secretly executed Sam who had completed the 3-year contract, and activated a new clone Sam at the same time. The company uses pre-recorded footage of his wife and daughter to power Sam's work, and the real Tom's wife died a few years ago. We finally know that Sam is just a machine that constantly performs loop operations, and family love is just the nourishment used by the capital company to maintain his work.
This also leads to the theme of the film's "lost", which is a crisis of human identity based on modern civilization. Sam in "The Moon" is a typical representative of being kidnapped by modern civilization. He can't determine who he is and can't calculate the meaning of his existence.
It may not be appropriate to say that Sam was a victim of the capitalist system. In other words, Sam is not just a lamb to be slaughtered by the capitalists, he is the victim and victim of the entire modern industrial civilization. Tragedy like Sam also essentially reflects the contradiction between the huge amount of information asymmetry between ordinary people and the social background, and whether this contradiction is reflected in movies or in real life, the biggest beneficiary is Capitalists with huge resources.
In a fairly macro sense, everyone in modern society is like Sam. In an age where the internet makes it easier for us to “embrace the world,” once we feel like our embrace isn’t big enough, we get caught up in a huge amount of information anxiety. We, who are mixed in our hearts, are like the cloned Sams, refreshing ourselves again and again, but we not only act as our own "capitalists", but also act as Sam himself. Compared with Sam in the film, our "rebirth" is more like self-castration time and time again.
Sam in the film is always numb, and this numbness is aimed at loneliness; in reality, we are also numb, and this numbness comes from anxiety. What they have in common is that they are unable to resist in the face of the complex world.
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