The next frontier in science fiction isn't about aliens. It's about alienation. It isn't about new worlds peppered among those billions of galaxies in space. It's about the most desolate, dullest place man can ever step on. Duncan Jones' Moon experiments with just that. Click the link for the bloody synopsis, I haven't got the patience to summarize the thing. Just a couple of things the movie is assuming:

1. Extracting Helium 3 from the moon is practical.
2. Mining the moon hasn't any detrimental effect on Earth.
3. Scientists can mass produce clones, much less launch them into outer space.
4. Clones and robots have the same status as slaves--both are inferior to vagina-expelled human beings.
5. Man has replaced God as the creator, rendering God and morality unnecessary.
6. The government and the scientific community are oblivious to all this cloning thingamajigger.
7. Robots are more humane than humans. (Very Blade-Runnery.)

All thus listed except the last are difficult to swallow. Should Moon pose itself a hard SF flick, it lacks the kick to prompt me to suspend my disbelief.

1. Yes, Helium 3 is an excellent energy replacement for fossil fuels. Turns machines into tree huggers. But sending mining equipments and space shuttles to and fro the moon costs billions of dollars worth of rocket fuel. It just isn't practical. Say, man has discovered a cheaper way to transport He3 to Earth. American pirates wouldn't be the only ones digging the treasure on the moon would it. Arr, moonbase pirateships representing different countries all over the world would flock the dull rock. It'd be a hubbub of eyepatched Johnny Depps sword fighting and smashing rum bottles against each other.

2. Harvesting the moon its He3 poses ethical problems which have yet to be protected by cosmological laws. It's no different from illegal logging, in other words. The moon is necessary to sustain the evolutionary processes of life on Earth. Harvesting its resources, thereby transferring its mass to Earth, has detrimental effect on gravity. This simplest most important law of nature, if tipped to the tiniest of changes, could result to mass extinction of several species. He3 just isn't the answer to our global energy crisis. The problem isn't energy crisis to begin with. It's overpopulation. Producing too many humans too fast wanting so many things all at the same time, sooner or later you wouldn't wonder why you're breathing more fart than you normally should.

Nevertheless, the moon would suffer the same fate of Nibbler's home planet Vergon 6 if it were to be mined. After Vergon 6 was harvested of its dark matter pellets (the fecal matter of Nibblonians), it simply collapsed into itself. If the moon collapses into itself, what would become of hippie surfers all over the world? What would become of evolution?

3 & 4. Reproductive cloning. It's not like this hasn't been dealt with before. In Futurama, Professor Hubert Farnsworth cloned himself to grant him a successor to all his inventions. His clone Cubert, however, is far beyond the mirror image of himself. For one, Cubert's nose is upturned and pig-like due to being squashed up too long against the wall of his cloning tube. Besides that, he doesn't give a doodley-squat about Farnsworth's inventions. He doesn't want to be a scientist. He wants to be an artist. Case point in: clones are unique in themselves regardless of the fingerprints they share with their original copies.

Moon is suffering from multiple identity crisis, existential and suicidal at that, once the clones realize they indeed are clones. But what makes clones different from their original copy?

The answer is this: nothing.

Structurally, there is no discernible difference. A clone is a carbon-copy of the original, regardless of its unique personality traits. So: what power does anybody have, anybody at all, to say that clones are inferior to their original copy? If I cook carbonara and cook another the exact same way, what grants anybody the power to tell which is better? Whoever that person is, he's a royally pompous asswipe.

Despite this, them clones in the movie are no different from the robot Gerty. All of them were programmed by real humans who came from real slimy vaginae. They share the same properties of mass produced objects, much like the mass produced clones in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But Huxley's reproductive cloning was rather socially acceptable. It wasn't just acceptable; it was the norm. Moon, however, is grounded on the same beliefs and ideologies we have about cloning today. The debate persists, and the world of Moon is still immature and oblivious to take any side just yet. Is it supporting cloning or is it against it?

Then comes the question: where the hell is the humanity in all this torpedo shit?

And what the fuck is up with all the cloning when AI's can do all the stupid harvesting to begin with? I just fail to see the purpose of a human being on the moon.

The movie can do away with the cloning--what with all that personal existential drama that really made me want to puke my ovaries out. It can do away with the harvesting; mining the moon already creates far more problems than solving any of them. Moon just fails to see the complications and consequences of every bit of detail put into it. It's what I call skiffy.

5 & 6. The film too is riddled with puns on religion and morality. Examples: Sam's daughter is named Eve, the same clone from Adam's ribs. The harvesters are named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospels that tell Jesus' similarly asexual birth.

Man is elevated into the status of God, what with the power to fiddle with carbon-based entities. But I can't see the point of clones when them scientists are merely being immoral, unthinking, and uncreative. In the real world, such sort of scientists cannot possibly exist.

Skiffy Moon assumes that without God, man has no reason to be moral. When God massacred millions of people in the Old Testament, nobody questioned his morality. But when the new god, man, does the same atrocious act (ie., disposing clones as need be), we're supposed to hate him.

It could be, all this is but about man's claim to the highest forms of power: access to clean nuclear energy, and the power to create and destroy humans. But with all this power comes a price: to be inhuman.

God is not human. Was he therefore inhuman? What are we, then?

7. Oh the irony of it all come the ending. This story isn't about them clones really. It's really about that giant humping robot Gerty. Moon follows the footsteps of Blade Runner, The Bicentennial Man, and Space Odyssey: humans and robots have traded places. Humans have become inhumane and robots humane, regardless of the programming.

Aye, the robot is the hero again! Which goes to say Moon just isn't original.

I'm prolly the only person who hates the film. I hate it just as much as I hate 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Solaris. All four have one special thing in common: the yawn.

Still, if there's one thing my heart leapt out for in this movie it's this:

An Alice in Wonderland geek t-shirt!XD [ link ]

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