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StreamingSoundtracks.com - Moon - Clint Mansell
| Album Information |
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Album
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Moon |
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Artist
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Clint Mansell |
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Year
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2009 |
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Genre
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Soundtrack |
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Rating
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 |
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ASIN
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B002FG9NLY |
Hint: Hover over buttons and album/artist name next to the cover for more info.
| Reviewers Rating |
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1 review done for this album. |
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| My Moon Review in it's entirety. |
| By: |
BrewersGuy |
| Date: |
14 Jan 2010 |
| Rating: |
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Having now just watching the “Moon” movie (2009), I feel I have multiple opinions that people on this site might find interesting or worthy of being read. Again, these are only opinions and you are free to form your own.
Without going into too much detail or spoiling the plot for those who haven’t yet seen, I shall sum up the story so that you may be informed.
The movie first informs the audience that the discovery of a new material harvested on the moon can reduce emissions and help recover our planet. This material is called Helium3 and it was found to be embedded on the rock surface of the moon. The movie then picks up close to the end of the 3-year contract, served by Astronaut Sam Bell. His mission on the moon is collect the H3 that the harvester machines are automatically programmed to do, and then send the collected material back to earth via a small, coordinate-ready vessel. Essentially, he looks over things and performs the labor tasks right there on the moon’s surface. Sam’s only assistant and companion is an AI robot named Gerty; programmed with the missions and various other essential programs and skills, Gerty uses emotion-icons to portray the reaction it has to Sam’s requests, questions, etc. The movie doesn’t say whether there were any astronauts performing Sam’s tasks prior to him, but don’t look too much into that. His home is the Sarang (sp?) moon base, located on the face of the moon (unseen by earth), thus any communications being sent or received, have to travel via multiple antennas. Well, we come to find out that the live feed Comm.-link has been down the entire time that Sam’s been there, so any messages from his wife or Mission controls back on earth are delayed getting to him, and visa versa for sending any messages back. That lack of direct communication, enough to make anyone a little bit nuts for that time period, certainly takes its toll on Sam as he openly admits (to Gerty) that he’s started to hear, see, and experience things that he doesn’t think truly exist. Once you’ve gotten a sense for how his life is unfolding out in space, an issue arises with one of the harvesters. He travels out to service it, but when he’s out there he spots something that distracts him and actually crashes his rover into the harvester. When Sam awakes, he finds himself inside the infirmary of the moon-base. Now he is left to find out what happened out there, why is nothing adding up, and (most importantly) why does he keep running into himself on the base?
I do not want to give away any more descriptions for fear of answering those very questions.
Time for my review!!!
I’ll start with what I didn’t like about the film.
I did not appreciate the scene transition effect, practiced throughout the first half of the movie. In an effort to show the audience periods of time lapses, the scenes, at times, would get cut-off almost too soon, IMO. As they focused from one scene to the next, they used a fade-to-black-and-back effect; which almost distracted my mind from the plot (not necessarily because I wanted to know what was going to happen next in the previous scene, but because I wanted to see the full reaction of the character in that situation.) It’s kind of hard to explain, but I feel that they could’ve let the scenes go on just slightly longer than they did. Luckily, this transition effect pretty much stopped altogether about half-way through the film.
I also didn’t like the limited range of emotion-icons used by Gerty throughout the film. I mentally counted approximately 6 different expressions. The use of the emotion-icons isn’t pertinent to the pace of the story, but it is important to the feelings you collect during any giving scene. I must be so used to having over two dozen versions of smiley faces in the chat, that can’t look past what the writers somewhat overlooked by not including more variations.
There really wasn’t much else that I felt desperately needed improvement. “All systems go” from here on out.
Acting
This was primarily a one-man show. Sam Rockwell took on the tough role of Astronaut Sam Bell. You could argue that acting is so easy to do and that actors are giving more credit than they should; however, a big hats off to Sam R in this performance. I have enjoyed his acting in such films as “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” & “The Green Mile” playing Zaphod Beeblebrox & ‘Wild Bill’ Warton, respectively, where he intertwined, what seems like, his wacky personality into those roles. It goes without saying that the Sam Bell character was indeed written specifically with Sam Rockwell in mind. First time movie-director Duncan Jones originally wanted Sam R to play a specific role in one of Duncan’s other scripts, but Sam wanted to play a different character in that story. Thus Duncan wrote an entirely new script for the actor. Kind of greedy on Sam’s part (one would think), but the end product that everyone got in return was more than worthy of a mini-soap opera.
Sam Rockwell approached this role from every possible angle to ensure that the story meshed and was believable. He had stated, in an interview, that his delivery was all about having exact timing; and he was more right than anyone can imagine. There are scenes in the movie were Sam Bell is physically right next to himself. He's having back and forth conversations, physically fighting himself, and even carrying himself across corridors. In order to make the audience buy into the fact that they did not use a stunt double, Sam Rockwell rehearsed diligently, studied the footage of his first Sam's movements and reactions, and memorized his first Sam's placement in a room; all this in order to make sure the two characters didn't collide when they weren't supposed to. There were only a few spots where I felt like Sam Rockwell was not at his very peek of performing and could have slowed down to give it another take; but those moments were short-lived. Tremendous acting!
9.6 out of 10!
Visuals
I had almost no issues with the visual effects and the scenery. Baring in mind that they had a limited budget of $5 million (vs. Transformers ROTF budget of $200 Million), this British Independent Film had to focus more on indoor scenes and models, as opposed to all Computer Graphics. Their original hope was to film on location, but they instead wound up building the Sarang (sp?) Moon base, in its entirety. (Something I was I could've been in.) This brought their focus more so on lighting levels instead of scaling. I felt as though I wasn't being cheap-skated out of knowing how enclosing a setting like that could be for the character.
They also used a lot of models and scale replicas to cut down on costs; which IMO gives me the sense that that object (be it a rover or a harvester, etc.) did exist in real life. I can sense the mechanical aspect of the situation a lot better when models are used, as opposed to CGs.
When Sam was on the moon, I noticed limited jumping in his movements (a higher concentration of gravity) when I would've thought that I should have seen less restriction to the gravity of the moon's surface. So I guess you could say it was more in the acting, than in the visual effects. I'm also not all that familiar with the sun's path and how it traces on the moon, but they might have been showing sunlight when they shouldn't have (according to the story). The imagery of the moon/earths' surface was overall believable and I didn't see any flaws there. Make-up was just fine, and preformed the task that it needed to.
9.3 out of 10!
Score/Soundtrack
I hope that constantly requesting tracks from Clint Mansell's "Moon" soundtrack didn't hinder on my overall all experience when I orientated the score with the film. In part it seems like I didn't give my mind a fair shot. This is why; it seemed repetitive at times. How dare I say that, right?! Honestly though, the beginning few tracks, to go along with that awful fore-mentioned transition effect, seemed to come into play all too often; and I found that distracting. If you can play in your head the theme of the overall score, imagine hearing that all throughout the first half of the movie, and then again at the finale (though I will discuss the finale later). I enjoy Clint Mansell's work. I don't feel that he is better than JW or DE or JNH, but he certainly has made a name for himself; most especially due to his Requiem for a Dream score.
It was enjoyable music, but the main theme was much too dominantly used. However, I extremely enjoyed the finale. Going along with the pace of the movie, I was at peace with what I emotions I assumed I would feel at the completion of the film; but then the throttle kicked in and from out of nowhere the plot threw in a critical-timing element that got my heart rate pumping to an immensely level. It was caused by a carefully planned combinations of items, all sequenced in unison. Something happens in the plot and Sam Bell's character is frantic to complete a last-second, life-changing alteration that was combined with dramatic cinematography, and a punch you off your feet finale that (this time) was perfectly suited for the moment. When it was over, I felt anxious to watch the entire movie over again and then crank up the speaker volume for that finale scene! This score needed very little improvement.
9.5 out of 10!
Overall Movie Rating:
9.5 out of 10!
6 of 6 found this review helpful
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