Sam Rockwell's IR-Rated, Hard Sci-Fi Thriller Is The Ultimate Ego Death In Space
Written by Robert Scucci | Published
Just last week, I arrived in 2018 Shut upnot realizing it was a spiritual sequel to the 2009 blockbuster movie The month. I'll update that one soon, but I've got the bottom line, and everything I've learned about it The month suggested it's a solid sci-fi thriller, in line with classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Although both movies are technically in the same cinema, they are independent stories, but I still wanted context. It turns out, you don't need to see The month to enjoy, or not to enjoy, Shut up.
But in my mind, The month is a classic modern organization with clear themes and stakes, while Shut updespite not being a complete waste of time, it struggles to find its identity and comes across as disjointed.
If you believe it, they put a man on the moon
When The month introducing us to Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), we get a complete crash course in the nature of his work. He is a lone worker working for Lunar Industries on the Sarang station, located on the dark side of the moon, and he is about to finish his three-year contract. He works as an expert in the mining of another fuel known as helium-3. On Earth, the oil crisis makes mining for resources on the moon inevitable, but since the base is already there, it's a good job to turn around.
With constant reminders that external communications are down, Sam can only communicate with Earth through occasional video exchanges, but no live feeds. He gets updates from his wife, Tess (Dominique McElligott), and his young daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw), but it's not enough to combat the intense loneliness he feels every day. He finds friendship in a mobile AI named GERTY (Kevin Spacey), but the fact that his only physical relationship is a computer program doesn't do his mood any better.
Sam starts having hallucinations, which eventually lead him to a crashed rover where he finds another unconscious astronaut. Here's the kicker: the unconscious man appears to be Sam's identical twin, and GERTY isn't telling the whole truth. Both Sams find each other high, blaming each other for being clones before it dawns on them that they are both Sam's original partners. No one knows how long they've been living like this, or how many other clones are out there, hiding or toiling away in obscurity on the space station.
As the Sams work together, alongside GERTY, to uncover the true nature of their work and their identities, they encounter death, crash, and reunite multiple times, wondering how much of their lives are really real, and how much is a lie made possible by the false memory implants created by Lunar Industries.
Ego Death … IN PLACE!!!
Although it can be said that Sam Rockwell does an excellent job playing himself The monthI feel like that's the obvious thing to talk about, so I won't really go into it here. What I found most interesting about it The month this is exactly the system the Sams are working on. They make this shocking discovery, go through their grieving process, and come up with an escape plan.
They search the entire space station for clues about more clones, and go out on a reconnaissance mission to look for what they suspect is signal strength. GERTY is designed to be helpful to the Sams, but her ultimate goal is to keep the helium-3 train running at full speed so everyone on Earth can enjoy the fruits of their labor. What has stuck with me is that the Sams are easily able to learn the nature of their situation. He gets to the point where he asks GERTY why she can wander around without any consequences.
To me, that's where the real fear lies The month. It's a subtle idea that's casually portrayed throughout the film, but it's indicative of a much larger systemic problem at play. Both men, clones of the same astronaut and unaware of how long they have lived as clones, or how many clones have come before them, are able to foil the conspiracy without denying anything. This tells me that Lunar Industries has played this game long enough that they no longer care what individual Sam does because it doesn't matter. GERTY is tasked with keeping them waiting, sure, but it's such a lonely job in such a remote location that even if they successfully escape, so what?
The fact that these men are fighting for their lives, and it's not promising at all because the existing system that did all of this in the first place is so much bigger than them that their lives don't matter at all, is probably the most subtly scary thing about this film. This is just a line in the books. Their lives have literally been erased.
The whole program there The month performance is unimaginably stressful. The machine will continue to operate, and resources will continue to be mined. It doesn't matter that one clone crosses another path and devises a plan to escape to Earth to be with his family. The system is designed so that no one makes it far enough to reveal what is happening on the dark side of the moon.
Time will continue to march forward, and there will be more Sams coming to work and wondering why it's getting harder and harder to connect with their families in the world. It's a really scary look at how much humanity we will lose when the powers that be decide that resources are more important than the humanity they are supposedly trying to save.
As of this writing, The month is streaming for free on Tubi.
