Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MOON by Duncan Jones

Next Monday is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, making for a timely release date for Moon, a tasty little Phildickian tale of clones, paranoia, and futuristic fear and self-loathing. To wit:

You certainly can’t fault Duncan Jones’ ambition. Moon is only his second feature, and yet Jones has boldly gone where directors such as Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Soderberg and Trumbull have gone before. And as if that wasn’t enough pop-culture baggage to lug around, Jones – aka Zowie Bowie, and the director of the quirkiest sci-fi space oddity for some time – is David Bowie’s son.
  Under pressure? No man has more …
  Actually, Moon unfolds with the easy authority of a director in mid-career. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a lone astronaut working on a mining station on the dark side of the moon with only a talking computer, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), for company. Sam works for E-Lunar, a company strip-mining the moon of selenium, a miracle energy source which has recently reversed Earth’s chronic energy dependency. With his three-year contract running out in a matter of weeks, Sam is tired, bored and unkempt, but very much looking forward to going home to Earth to see his wife, Tess (Dominique McElligott), and young daughter, Eve.
  Unfortunately, while checking out a malfunctioning mining vehicle, Sam has a serious accident. The next we see of him, in the base’s infirmary, the previously scruffy miner is clean-shaven and immaculately dressed. Banned from moving outside the base by Gerty, Sam invents an excuse and goes to check the malfunctioning mining vehicle. Inside the vehicle he discovers his unkempt and unconscious but very much alive doppelganger. Is Sam hallucinating? Has he gone insane? Or has he simply – fiendishly – been cloned?
  It may sound perverse to say that a film that so explicitly references some of science-fiction’s most recognisable movies has a freshness and authenticity all of its own, but the movies Moon pays homage to – 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Solaris, even Blade Runner – are also thoughtful, introspective pieces that trade on the question that has sustained 2,500 years of philosophy: What is it, exactly, that makes us truly human? As Sam and Sam declare an uneasy truce, despite each thinking he is the original and the other the clone, the screenwriters, Jones and Nathan Parker, use their dilemma to ask a series of profound questions about the nature of humanity, about personality and uniqueness, about the very tools we use to measure who we are.   As is generally the case with the best sci-fi – or speculative fictions, as its devotees prefer – Moon is a fable about contemporaneous alienation, and for the moon-bound Sam, the isolation is literal as well as psychological and emotional. How is he ever likely to extricate himself from his predicament, asks the story, when he has only his mirror-image to turn to for answers? How is it possible to find the strength to live when your life is not even pointless in the face of the heedless cosmos, but a carbon copy of a pointless existence?
  Despite the relatively small budget of £5 million, Jones has created a superb lunar landscape, an utterly believable hinterland that sets the tone for Sam’s isolation with its vast backdrop of the limitless universe. The special effects give proceedings an unexpectedly appropriate other-worldly feel, the exteriors drenched in matt blacks and greys, and gleaming silvers, conveying the sense that Sam has woken up to discover himself not only in a nightmare, but a ghost story too, albeit a haunting that is – as with Kubrick’s The Shining – derived less from the supernatural than the manifestation of a fatally sickening mind.
  It’s not a perfect movie, of course. There are craters in the plot, the largest concerning the fact that Sam ploughs a lone furrow as a lunar miner. If selenium is the miracle energy provider the movie claims it to be, wouldn’t a host of companies on Earth have laid claim to parts of the moon? And even if the E-Lunar company had a monopoly on the source of lunar selenium, it would surely have a small army of Sams at work on the dark side of the moon.
  Caveats aside, Moon is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking offering. Rockwell turns in an excellent performance, particularly as he’s playing against himself for practically the entire movie. He does get support from Spacey as the lugubrious robot Gerty, who in turn offers some flashes of black humour. Gerty, to all sci-fi fans, is the latest incarnation of Hal, the mission-wrecking computer from 2001. When Gerty helps rather than hinders Sam at a crucial point in the story, Sam is moved to ask why. “Because it’s my job to help you, Sam,” Gerty replies, deadpan, setting off a million dark and knowing chuckles.
  As for Duncan Jones, well, he’s got a black sense of humour too. Rather than have Sam rise each morning to the alarm-clock strains of the more appropriate Space Oddity, or Major Tom, Jones has him wake to (koff) Chesney Hawkes’ The One and Only. ****

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty

More good news and bad news, folks. The good news is that Adrian McKinty (right) has started a blog (which is currently hosting a rather interesting letter to the Joycean scholar who reviewed THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD in the Irish Times), with the bad news being that that means he very probably won’t be writing this kind of malarkey for Crime Always Pays anymore. Boo, etc. The other good news is that Ol’ Happy Chops won’t be doing very much with the blog until later this year, so we might still get some quality writing out of him yet. To wit:

Kerouac, L. Ron Hubbard and South Park: Denver Before Its Moment in the Sun

For four days next month the eyes of the world will turn to Denver, Colorado, where the Democratic Convention is being held. Sure it’s all going to be about speeches, balloons and scoring coke and hookers on Colfax Avenue, but what if you want to get deeper than that? What if you want to find out about the real Denver?
  I lived in the Mile High City for nine years so I know a bit about it. Modesty forbids me from mentioning my own Denver novels HIDDEN RIVER and FIFTY GRAND. Oh wait, I just did. Sorry.
  Jack Kerouac is Denver’s big name author. Kerouac came to town in pursuit of America, the open road and his man-crush, native Denverite, Neal Cassady. It was in Denver that Kerouac bought his first house, had his first serious tequila bender and began planning ON THE ROAD. Sniffing after Kerouac came William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who spent many a fertile hour in the Colburn Hotel cooking mescaline, injecting bug spray and writing the occasional poem.
  Thomas Pynchon followed a little later, Denver cropping up in several places in his work, but most importantly in AGAINST THE DAY, in which we are transported back to the bawdy turn-of-the-century city where you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a gin joint, a prostitute or another lunatic swinging a cat. AGAINST THE DAY contains my favourite line in all of literature, a graffiti written on a Denver wall: “Roses is red/shit is brown/nothing but assholes/live in this town.”
  But surely the highlight of Denver’s literary legacy has to be its prominence in L. Ron Hubbard’s BATTLEFIELD EARTH. The first time I tried to read BATTLEFIELD EARTH it got thrown out of a train window, when I was 14, by me. Years later I read it again, because a girl asked me to do it for an article she was writing. The girl is now a rich and fairly well known TV historian and I’m a substitute teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. Let me summarize the book for you, so you don’t make my mistake.
  In 3000 AD, Earth is ruled by the Psychlos, nine-foot-tall sociopathic aliens. Humans are slaves called “man animals” who toil bare chested in open cast mines. The hero of the book is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (yes, really) an escapee from Psychlo clutches who makes his way to the ruins of the Denver Public Library where he finds a copy of the US Constitution in a display case. Inspired perhaps by the commerce clause of this austere legal document Jonnie decides to lead a revolt against the alien overlords. After a few setbacks the revolt gathers momentum and then we only have about 900 pages to go. Interestingly, the Denver Public Library has no display cases containing the US Constitution and all five of its copies of BATTLEFIELD EARTH have been stolen. A Psychlo conspiracy perhaps?
  I haven’t seen the film version of BATTLEFIELD EARTH but by all accounts it’s up there with Swept Away, Gigli and other modern classics.
  If you’re an L. Ron Hubbard fan then allow me to suggest a field trip while you’re in town. Jump on I-70, drive west for a few hours and you’ll come to Tom Cruise’s house in Telluride, Colorado. Mr. Cruise welcomes visitors, especially if you’re carrying a copy of his and (potential McCain VP) Mitt Romney’s favourite novel. Seriously, just park right outside the big metal gates and start yelling “Tomcat! Tooomcaaat!” You’ll have lots of fun. Tom’s sister is in charge of security at the Cruise Lair and is famous for her sense of humour.
  Strangely, Denver is also home to those nemeses of Scientology - Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park. The Denver suburb of South Park is near Evergreen where Parker went to high school but South Park itself is probably modelled on either Boulder, Co. where the boys attended college or Colorado Springs about forty minutes south which is the HQ of Focus on the Family and is reputedly the “most right-wing town in America.” Trey Parker’s childhood home can be found easily but leaving little brown gifts dressed as Santa on the front porch is a joke well past its sell by date.
  If the idea of making a Christmas Turd or being pepper-sprayed by Tom Cruise’s security guards doesn’t excite you, then head back to Denver and out on the I-76 to Fort Morgan, where Philip K. Dick rests forever opposite a sugar cane refinery in the grim Fort Morgan Municipal Cemetery. There are always a lot of interesting characters at Dick’s grave, many from Japan, Finland and that comic-book shop you always walk by but never go in. Get them talking about the nature of reality and whether Dick could be alive in a parallel universe and you’ll happily watch the morning pass by.
  Finally, let me mention David Icke’s book THE BIGGEST SECRET, in which the former BBC reporter and Green Party co-chair claims that “lizard aliens from Mars, through their allies, the Freemasons,” have been running the planet Earth from a secret bunker at the Denver International Airport. Once I lost my bag at DIA and had to go to a basement storage area to retrieve it. I see now that I was lucky to get out alive.
  To sum up: If you’ve never been to Denver before, don’t worry about it, for most people it’s that place they groggily drive through on the way to Vail. But take my advice and go. Even if the Democrats have left town you can still cheer for Obama, eat an Illegal Pete Famous Fish Fajita and put an offer on my house on Pennsylvania Street. Now that property prices have collapsed I’ll take anything: crayons, a box of old keys, interesting (or not) house plants. I might even consider a soiled copy of BATTLEFIELD EARTH. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt later this year.

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other writers talk some sense for a change. This week: Adrian McKinty (right) on Philip K. Dick.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – A Metaphysical Detective Story

Like his near contemporary, the poet Philip Larkin, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick predicted his own death, dreamed about his death and of course wrote about his death. Dick wondered what being alive really felt like and whether death would kill that state of consciousness; sometimes he believed that death was merely a transition between states and other times that it was the final destination. Perhaps he hoped it was the former but knew it was the latter. “I’d rather be a living dog, than a dead science fiction writer,” he once said.
  DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (DADES) is one of his best known novels and it was here that he explored in some depth notions of dying and consciousness and why a good, decent man was trying to track down and murder sentient creatures who just wanted to be left alone.
  Dick’s death obsession began early. Born in Chicago in 1928, his twin sister Jane Charlotte Dick died when he was only a few weeks old. All his life Dick felt Jane’s absence and her loss is frequently referenced in his fiction. Jane was buried in a lonely grave in the bleak Colorado plains town of Fort Morgan with, morbidly, a space left on the headstone for baby Phil. The grave awaited Dick for five decades and when he died in 1982 sure enough the twins were reunited in death. In middle age, after years of amphetamine abuse, Dick even flirted with the idea that in a parallel universe he was the one that had died and Jane had survived – he was already buried in the grim Fort Morgan cemetery, next to Interstate 76, and Jane was the science fiction writer living in California.
  In our universe, after Jane’s death, Dick and his family migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. He went to the same high school as Ursula Le Guin and after a brief period at UC Berkeley he dropped out and quickly began selling science fiction stories to magazines and newspapers.
  Dick’s adult life was fragmented to say the least. He moved often, he was married five times and even though he wrote constantly he was not good at keeping money. His default paranoia was exacerbated by his experiments with drugs, his dealings with local street thugs, and his anti-government activities during the Nixon era.
  DADES was written during the period 1966-1968, probably the two most turbulent years America has experienced since World War II. Assassinations, riots, Vietnam, hippies, drugs, counter-culture, scandals and the Cold War were the context for Dick to write his novel, which is actually a pretty straightforward detective story set in a nightmare future.
  Dick (left) had read Dashiell Hammett and admired his style and it’s not a big stretch to compare DADES with THE MALTESE FALCON. The McGuffins are different but we’re in the same world: missing people, a shot partner, a femme fatale, trouble with the local cops and a bleak cynical universe from which no hope is expected and none is given. Perhaps it’s not even that big of a coincidence that when the movie version of DADES was filmed – as Blade Runner – the cameras rolled on the same set where they shot the Maltese Falcon forty years earlier. Both novels take place in San Francisco and both movies were filmed on the New York streets of Warner Brothers’ Burbank lot.
The plot of DADES is complex but basically we follow the story of Rick Deckard in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco as he tracks down runaway androids, deals with his Virtual Reality-addicted wife, and keeps up the pretence that his electric sheep is in fact real. The latter storyline is the most interesting thematic element of the novel. After World War Terminus, real animals are rare and caring for and protecting any kind of a real creature gives one incredible status. For someone with low self esteem in a job he hates, Deckard hopes to fool everyone, including ultimately himself, about the sheep; perhaps if he pretends hard enough that his sheep is real and that he is a good man these things might actually come true.
  Deckard meets up with the beautiful and deceitful Rachael, who turns out to be an android and later in one extraordinary scene he is taken to a police station where he either has a mental breakdown or else he sees the world for what it really is: everyone in this precinct appears to be an android – it’s the humans that are unusual and in this place it’s Deckard himself who is the fake like his sheep.
  Shaking off this strange vision he pursues the final runaways, becoming more disillusioned than ever as he realizes that cracking this case will bring not happiness but only further existential crises. Where is he going? What is he doing with his life? What are any of us doing with any of our lives? Like Sam Spade at the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, Deckard has no solutions. He wonders what all of it means and comes up with nothing. Following Hammett, Philip K Dick doesn’t give us any answers either except for the vague but possibly deep idea that the meaning of life is to be found in the search for the meaning of life. The best we can do is to strive for the truth, although we are constantly reminded to be wary, for falsity is everywhere: the Maltese Falcon is a fake, the electric sheep is a fake, Deckard is a fake and maybe even brash, confident, hardnosed Sam Spade is a fake.
  Many of Philip K Dick’s books were written hastily under the influence of speed and are of dubious quality, but the books that he took trouble over – DADES, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, A SCANNER DARKLY, FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID – are all well-crafted mystery stories usually with a cop protagonist. Yes, he was a science fiction writer, but also a genre-busting detective novelist too.
  Unfortunately (and unlike Hammett) Dick did not live long enough to see the critics lionize him as an American original. His final years were spent in an increasingly eccentric investigation of the true nature of God and the cosmos. In a March 02 1980 diary entry, Dick predicted that because he was close to uncovering the secrets of the universe, God would pull the plug on this version of Philip K Dick; two years later, on March 02 1982, the plug was literally pulled on a brain-dead Dick as he lay in a hospital in Santa Ana, California.
  Dick’s obituary in the New York Times was a brief three paragraphs long but since then his reputation has grown, first in France, then the UK, and then, belatedly, in the US. Almost a dozen Dick stories and books have become films and Blade Runner is regularly voted the greatest science fiction movie of all time. However, Philip K. Dick still gets a bad rap as a writer. A recent New Yorker piece described his characters as hollow and poorly crafted and his prose as pedestrian at best.
  No one would argue that Dick was a great stylist or an inventor of an American idiom, like Hammett, but he was the purveyor of brilliant concepts and his talent was exceptional. Students of American noir will enjoy Dick’s better novels and will judge him not by his prose but by his gift for originality and his ability to convey extraordinary ideas in even more extraordinary worlds. – Adrian McKinty