A Science Fictional Year: Lonely Sci-Fi.

Last movie: Moon. I feel like I’ve been watching these movies since the beginning of time.

I wish, at least a little bit, I’d watched either The Fountain or Sunshine last, those two being far and away my favorites in this batch. I have so much more to say about those. I was kind of disappointed by Moon when I saw it. It seemed to share so much (from the trailers) with the other movies on this list, all of which have something supernatural or near-supernatural in their science (Gravity excepted), but instead it’s a corporate cloning plot.

I suppose its nearest literary analogue is Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” in which a utopic society is only able to exist because every person in the city is required to abuse a single child caged in a basement. Somehow, without explaining the logistics, this city is only be to maintained if one person internalizes all the suffering. In the same way, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the only person on the Moon mining it for it’s helium-3 reserves, and we on the planet reap the energy benefits which virtually reverses our environmentally catastrophes overnight and divorces us of our oil dependence. However, Sam Bell must be divorced from any human communication, endlessly clones, and every clone designed to come down with a mean case of tuberculosis every three years if they don’t die on the job. But like in “Omelas” in which everyday two or three people decide they can’t handle living in the city and leave forever, every so often a clone gets out. That’s Moon in a nutshell.

It’s hard figuring out why this movie doesn’t appeal to me, because it is an interesting story with some beautiful imagery. Ultimately, I feel like it’s because the movie brings us right up to the clones, the edge of saying something about the nature of reality, and then stops making it just a movie about escape. It’s not bad, but if you’re in the mood for sentient suns and exploding conquistadors, it can leave you feeling a little meh.

However, it’s (already awesome) soundtrack did inspire some amazing hip-hop. If you’re into that sort of thing, then behold Selene.

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jh montgomery

I'm a guy with opinions. Some of those are about science fiction. Like a voice shouting into a hurricane of voices, I write about science fiction for Hush Comics. I grew up watching the original Star Trek with my mom in our basement. I have shockingly few memories of it, apart from the silver and gray grid covered VHS boxes old Star Trek tapes came in, but it left it's mark forever. My first memory of being in a movie theater was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. A group entered dressed as the crew of Star Trek, acting the part (the man dressed in Vulcan robes addressing the man with a middle-aged lesbian perm as captain). I nearly lost my mind with the excitement of sharing a theater with Leonard Nimoy. No no, my mom would tell me: that's someone dressing up. Impossible. Later, I would walk in on my parents watching the wrong movie at the wrong moment and be mortally terrified of alien abductions from the age of eight to thirteen. This fear was so strong, I couldn't watch the X-Files until it came to Netflix. As a teenager, hearing the theme song coming from another room in the house would give me anxiety. Science fiction, at its best is the pursuit, and evolution, toward transcendance: cultural, technological, spiritual. Transcendance marked me early, and forever.

What do you think?