Movie Review

Another movie I've watched recently was Moon (2008). These are the kind of movies I like in a sad kind of way.

So this guy named Sam has a three year contract to work for this company on the moon. For the whole contract, he is the only person at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth, so his only real interactions are with GERTY , the intelligent computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey) whose function is to attend to his day to day needs.

Towards the end he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess and his baby daughter Eve, who was born just prior to him leaving. With two weeks left, he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured, he wakes up back at the station in the infirmary, he assumes assisted by GERTY. At this time GERTY tells him that a rescue team is heading to the station to fix the harvester.

While he is recuperating, he is beginning to get more and more paranoid, especially when the computer won't allow him to go outside anymore. He eventually breaks something and fakes an accident so the computer will let him outside. Instead of doing the fake repairs, he heads to the broken harvester and finds a body inside. He drags it back to the base and to the infirmary. And lo and behold, guess who it is? Yep, it's him.

So now the old Sam thinks he is just imagining the new Sam. The new Sam wonders where the other came from if he was supposed to be alone up there. As they have "conversations" you're not sure if you're watching insanity or reality. Old Sam becomes convinced he is a clone while new Sam scours the base for a secret room that contains "extra people". In his paranoia, old Sam swears he hears GERTY having a live conversation with someone on Earth. During this time, old Sam's health has been deteriorating badly. As he's trying to prove he was right about GERTY, he actually finds the missing room the new Sam was looking for. They go down there together only to discover...they are both clones. The room is filled with Sam clones.

Then they start to figure out what is going on. They realize they are purposely being left in the dark and without communications and since GERTY was having a conversation with someone, everything must be operational. They each head out in their lunar truck things and go way past the boundary of the base. They discover that there are radar jammers encircling the whole encampment. Old Sam takes out a radio and gets a connection to Earth where he tries to call his wife. A 15 year old Eve answers, and said her mom had died a few years ago. At that point he hears his own voice in the background...

Back at the base they realize that at the end of the three year contract the clone dies (or is killed). Either way he never makes it home, a new one just replaces him. Apparently they've gone through this cycle five times already. Problem is, they both know now and they realize that the maintenance crew that's coming is actually on the way to kill them also. Old Sam is sick and close the death anyway. With the assistance of GERTY (who only wanted to help them), they form a plan for new Sam to escape in those shipments they shoot back to Earth.

GERTY gets a fresh clone out to be awakened as soon as new Sam leaves. New Sam drives the old, now dying Sam back to the harvester and places him back inside, where he loses consciousness. Before new Sam gets in with the cargo, he programs the harvesters to drive over the radar jammers so the next clone (and subsequent ones) won't have to go through what they did. Re-establishing contact and exposing the lies.

New Sam takes off, just as the maintenance team lands. Old Sam regains consciousness just long enough to see new Sam streaking overhead, heading towards the home he will never return to...

And that's how it ends. It's a good movie, but I would have to be in the right mood to watch it again.

P.S. And do not forget to recommend this blog continues.

Movie Review (Doomsday)

I've been clicking through alot of "best" movie lists to see if anything has slipped by without me noticing.  So instead of, you know, watching the same old movies again and again (Transformers, Harry Potter, Pirates, etc) I was hoping I would stumble on something good that wasn't run of the mill over-hyped crap.

So under the "best" post apocalyptic movies was one called Doomsday (2008). There was a disease that broke out in London and they isolated all the infected people to the north and put up a wall stretching east/west all across the UK. So I'm thinking this is going to be like 28 Days Later or I Am Legend kind of movie (since they were in the same list). Some 25 years later a satellite takes pictures of the zombie zone and sees people actually still alive. Now add that to the fact that the disease just broke out again in the south they're thinking that the northern folks have a cure or are immune. Time to send someone in to find some doctor that had been working on the vaccine before he was lost behind the wall. Okay, interesting set up and you have me interested. Unfortunately, that didn't last for long.

So the head bad-ass chick takes a team over the wall. As a side note, she had lost her right eye as a child in the initial riots when they closed the wall, but was saved by a military helicopter when her mom threw her on there at the last minute. Now all grown up she has this electronic eye thing as a replacement that she can pop out and control with her watch. No really.

First town they head into and suddenly I'm watching Mad Max. Crazy people, motorcycles, fire spewing, the whole thing. All hell breaks loose, their armored tank things are taken out by Molotov cocktails and bats and crossbows. Yeah. And they're all captured, but they eventually escape from these dickheads (after they've cooked and eaten one the the military dudes after a big display and stage show). They are helped escaping by the doctor's daughter on, are you ready for this, a steam train, because those suckers can go from zero to walking speed in no time flat!

After traveling cross some beautiful British countrysides, they have to abandon the train (sniff) in what looks like an abandoned military supply bunker and go the rest of the way on foot. In the forest they are looking for the doctor when they come across his guard. On horses. In armor. Oh great, now we're in fricking Camelot and guess which crazy nutbag thinks he's King Arthur? Yep, the doctor they were looking for. And now they're prisoners again and do the whole escape thing, but only after she kills some Goliath armored dude in the arena. And also they find out there's no cure. The people only survived by natural selection.

So now they're being chased from the castle and they had back to that bunker again. She finds a manifest and starts looking for useful things. Satellite phone? Check. Mercedes Benz. Check. Weapons and ammo. Nope. As the Knights of the Stupid Table break into the bunker, they escape out the backside in the brand new Mercedes. Wide open roads is all they see as they head back towards the wall. Until...

Here come the morons from Mad Max town, who have caught up to them (?) in a grand selection of vehicles that you would expect in a post apocalypse. Among them are:

• A beat up old cop car with "bastards" spray painted across the hood
• Several motorcycles with antlers and skeletons on them
• A Volkswagen bug with what looked like one of those fan things off an everglades boat
• A plumber's truck with "your shit is our bread and butter" written on the side
• A bus with chain link fence all around it that shoots ninja star like projectiles
• A Studebaker

Yeah, all of these caught up to the good guys. I did point out that Mercedes was brand new right? Just checking. And on a side note, it's been 25 years...where did they get the gasoline? So this ridiculous chase/fight scene ensues with people jumping into the Mercedes through the windows and other general modes of attack. They fight them off one by one until the crazy leader is finally killed. She calls them on that satellite phone she found (and charged in the car so that avoided a plot problem before I even asked). A helicopter comes and only wants the immune doctor's daughter. He makes this speech about holding out on the cure until the riffraff dies away and then he swoops in with a cure and becomes a hero. She records it on her camcorder/GPS/Ipod eyeball thingy which she uses to ruin him politically.

The movie ends with her returning to her own kind. The police? The military? No, she goes back to Mad Max town with the head of their slain leader and tells them to "eat this". I guess she becomes their queen. I won't be watching this twice.