Moon

Moon is a 2009 science fiction film directed by Duncan Jones (in his directorial debut) and written by Nathan Parker from a story by Jones. The film follows Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the Moon. Kevin Spacey voices Sam's robot companion, GERTY. Moon premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and was released in selected cinemas in New York and Los Angeles on 12 June 2009. The release was expanded to additional theatres in the United States on 10 July and to the United Kingdom on 17 July. A follow-up film containing an epilogue to the film's events, Mute, was released in 2018. A third installment, a graphic novel called Madi: Once Upon A Time in the Future, was released in 2020. Moon was modestly budgeted and grossed just under $10 million worldwide, but was well-received by critics. Rockwell's performance found praise. The movie won numerous film critic and film festival awards and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Film, and won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2010. Plot In the near future, Lunar Industries has made a fortune after an oil crisis by building Sarang Station, a facility on the far side of the Moon to mine the alternative fuel helium-3 from lunar soil, which is rich in the material. The facility is highly automated, requiring only a single human to maintain operations, oversee harvester machines, and launch canisters bound for Earth containing the extracted helium-3. Samuel Bell nears the end of his three-year work contract at Sarang Station. Chronic communication problems have disabled his live feed from Earth and limit him to occasional recorded messages from his wife Tess, who was pregnant with their daughter Eve when he left. His only companion is an artificial intelligence named GERTY, who assists with the base's automation and provides comfort for him. Two weeks before his return to Earth, Sam begins to suffer from hallucinations of a teenage girl and a bearded, disheveled man. One such image distracts him while he is out recovering a helium-3 canister from a harvester, causing him to crash his lunar rover into the harvester. Rapidly losing cabin air from the crash, Sam falls unconscious.