‘Moon’: the film Terry Gilliam called a “modern-day 2001: A Space Odyssey”
For any director who has worked in the domain of science fiction, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal masterpiece – 2001: A Space Odyssey – is always an incredibly rich and infinitely nuanced source of inspiration. It’s a film that transcends the limitations of the cinematic medium, offering a vision of the cosmos that is too powerful and all-encompassing to process. Over the years, countless artists have been moved by Kubrick’s magnum opus and among them is Terry Gilliam.
Throughout his illustrious career, Gilliam has ventured into sci-fi through interesting projects such as 12 Monkeys, which have challenged our understanding of the genre. While Gilliam often draws on diverse influences, such as French auteur Chris Marker, he has always maintained an enduring admiration for the nearly flawless filmography of Stanley Kubrick. Although Kubrick’s 2001 is simply unparalleled, Gilliam surprised everyone by naming a successor.
During a conversation with Little White Lies, the director cited Duncan Jones’ 2009 sci-fi work Moon as the modern version of Kubrick’s original masterpiece. While talking about the strengths of the film, Gilliam elaborated: “I think Moon is a really brilliant example of contemporary sci-fi because it has a message, it has strong visuals, but it also has a proper science-fiction core. It’s the closest thing to a modern-day 2001 I have seen.”
Jones’ impressive directorial debut stars Sam Rockwell as a man with the loneliest assignment imaginable – mining helium-3 on the moon with nobody else in sight. In this intense isolation, he has nobody to reach out to except his AI voice assistant named GERTY, who acts as a comforting companion for the man. Despite the fact Rockwell has done some great work in many iconic features, Moon is always singled out as one of his best.
In an interview with CinemaBlend, Jones claimed that he made the project only because he wanted to work with Rockwell. He said: “I came up with it because I wanted to work with Sam Rockwell. I met up with him three years ago. We talked about another project, which was too ambitious for a first feature film. We just couldn’t convince each other, but it was good because it wasn’t the right film to do as a first film anyway. I was a huge fan of his and thought he was an amazing actor.”
When asked about the parallels with 2001, the director added: “We do pay homage to a lot of science fiction film, and that is kind of our 2001 homage. But there’s no point recreating the same character and making them exactly the same. Otherwise, you really are just ripping them off. What I wanted to do is for science fiction people, allow their expectations to be set up at the beginning of the film, let them make those connections with HAL.”
Labelled as one of the greatest additions to the notoriously difficult genre of hard sci-fi, Moon is a technical masterpiece that poses important questions.
