Sam Rockwell's MOON trailer & poster

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

The nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the classic Andrei Tarkovsky film Solaris, and maybe a more obscure reference Bruce Dern's Silent Running are present with Duncan Jones' directorial debut Moon, one of the highly praised films that came out of the Sundance Film Festival which Sony Pictures Classics will release on June 12th in the U.S. (no U.K. date yet). Moon feels like it belongs firmly in that late 60's/early 70's era. The time where challenging science fiction stories, even those not set in space like Planet of the Apes, were constantly being played on our screens where aliens were no longer the enemy, it was man itself and his failings as the imperfect human being. Unable to live with other people, and unable to live all by themselves.

There's been a telling shift recently back to this kind of character based science fiction storytelling, obviously with Soderbergh'sremake of Solaris, Danny Boyle's 2/3rd's classic Sunshine and even the Disney kids movie with a robot lead... Wall*E.

And I'm so happy that in the usual mindless Summer blockbuster season, our American friends will have the opportunity to have their mind tested by a movie that isn't doing everything in it's power to make $300 million. Hopefully it will get a release in Britain before the Sunny days of the summer are gone. In Moon, Sam Rockwell plays a contractor who has only two weeks left of his three year contract to work on the moon's surface by himself. But in classic sci-fi fashion, he begins to see things, awful and impossibly true hallucinations and he slowly begins to descend into madness. Kevin Spacey voices Rockwell's only companion, a computer, a modern day version of Hal. You can see the trailer for the movie below...