We're just days away from the release of Netflix's second major sci-fi movie of February: Mute, directed by Source Code and Warcraft director Duncan Jones, has been in the works for over a decade now, and arrives with an amazing cast, including newly-minted star Alexander Skarsgard. But on top of being Jones's passion project for the past 15, Mute is exciting in another sense, too: It's set in the same world as his first—and still his best—film, Moon.
It would be unfair to say Duncan Jones was flying under the radar ahead of his feature film debut, Moon. In fact, for a mere $7 million sci-fi movie made by a newcomer with one recognizable actor, the anticipation was at a veritable fever pitch for one simple reason: It was an intriguing space mystery movie made by David Bowie's son.
It's a testament to Moon that the parenthood of Jones felt nearly irrelevant as soon as people actually saw the movie. Moon is a singular triumph, one that earned Jones a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, and quickly became a seminal piece of sci-fi filmmaking.
It would be difficult to pinpoint the most impressive aspect of Moon. For a film made nearly a decade ago on a shoestring budget, it still looks gorgeous. Jones used physical sets as much as possible (most of the outside shots on the moon's surface utilized miniatures instead of CGI). Its story is a slow-burn mystery that never whacks you over the head with its twists, rather teasing out the big reveals in natural conversation and letting the implications dawn on you in your own time.
Oh, and there's one actor in the entire movie.
To an extent, I guess. There is a stacked supporting cast to Moon, but via actors who do not appear physically within the film at any point. The one exception is, of course, Sam Rockwell, who plays Sam Bell, a remote technician who works for Lunar Industries aboard a purpose-built station on the far side of the moon. He's alone, save for the occasional recorded message from his wife (Dominique McElligott) or bosses (Matt Berry and Benedict Wong) down on earth. His one companion is the suspiciously helpful robot GERTY, a reassuringly clunky piece of future-tech who utilizes basic emojis to express itself and is, quite unfortunately, voiced by Kevin Spacey.
It's my hope that proves irrelevant in the long run, since this is top-to-bottom Rockwell's movie. (There is a small but vocal contingent insisting Rockwell's all-but-inevitable Oscar for Three Billboards is, in fact, a retrospective course-correction for the Academy's snubbing his Moon performance.) Moon is his movie more than once over, in fact. This is a mystery movie after all, and, after introducing a seriously high-concept twist, both Rockwell and Jones come into their own. On a routine piece of maintenance work, Bell crashes his rover on the surface. He's injured, and debris starts piling up around his vehicle with no chance of escape. He puts his helmet on before he passes out.
Suddenly, he's awake, alive and well, in the medical bay back at the base station. GERTY tells him to relax; he's been in an accident. After becoming frustrated by his quarantine, and suspicious of GERTY's motivations, he orchestrates a trick to get back outside to check out the crash site. There, he finds the totaled rover with an unconscious Sam Bell still inside.
To say any more of the in-world logic that makes such a thing possible, or the fates of these two Sam Bells would be to ruin the rest of Moon, but its central mystery, thankfully, never completely dominates the questions of humanity central to Bell's discovery. In fact, the film is quite leisurely in its journey towards answers or adventure. Instead of trying to hit its audience with jarring twists, it enjoys itself as much as possible in the interaction between the two Sams, as impressive in its technical seamlessness (Jones claims a technique used in which the two shake hands had never been attempted before) as it is in Rockwell's performance. Not once is there any confusion about which Sam is which. Rockwell plays the crashed-and-rescued Sam with an almost zen-like eccentricity and hopefulness, and the "new" Sam with no small amount of spiky arrogance. All the same, each of these men is undoubtedly Sam Bell.
Moon's legacy may or may not grow and change after the release this week of its vaguely-related follow-up Mute, which promises, at the very least, a cameo from Rockwell as Sam Bell. In all honesty, it would be a welcome-but-needless bookend to what already is a complete idea. It's a rare sci-fi film that deigns to go small, both in its ambition and the themes it explores. There are things it could be saying about unchecked capitalism and workers' rights, or about (maybe) the male ego. Somehow, none of that's quite as engaging as the story of a lonely man trapped on another world, who doesn't even know he needs to escape.