For any director who has labored within the area of science fiction, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal masterpiece – 2001: A Area Odyssey – is at all times an extremely wealthy and infinitely nuanced supply of inspiration. It’s a movie that transcends the constraints of the cinematic medium, providing a imaginative and prescient of the cosmos that’s too highly effective and all-encompassing to course of. Through the years, numerous artists have been moved by Kubrick’s magnum opus and amongst them is Terry Gilliam.
All through his illustrious profession, Gilliam has ventured into sci-fi by fascinating initiatives similar to 12 Monkeys, which have challenged our understanding of the style. Whereas Gilliam typically attracts on numerous influences, similar to French auteur Chris Marker, he has at all times maintained a permanent admiration for the practically flawless filmography of Stanley Kubrick. Though Kubrick’s 2001 is just unparalleled, Gilliam shocked everybody by naming a successor.
Throughout a dialog with Little White Lies, the director cited Duncan Jones’ 2009 sci-fi work Moon as the trendy model of Kubrick’s authentic masterpiece. Whereas speaking concerning the strengths of the movie, Gilliam elaborated: “I feel Moon is a extremely good instance of latest sci-fi as a result of it has a message, it has sturdy visuals, nevertheless it additionally has a correct science-fiction core. It’s the closest factor to a modern-day 2001 I’ve seen.”
Jones’ spectacular directorial debut stars Sam Rockwell as a person with the loneliest project possible – mining helium-3 on the moon with no one else in sight. On this intense isolation, he has no one to succeed in out to besides his AI voice assistant named GERTY, who acts as a comforting companion for the person. Regardless of the actual fact Rockwell has executed some nice work in lots of iconic options, Moon is at all times singled out as certainly one of his greatest.
In an interview with CinemaBlend, Jones claimed that he made the venture solely as a result of he needed to work with Rockwell. He mentioned: “I got here up with it as a result of I needed to work with Sam Rockwell. I met up with him three years in the past. We talked about one other venture, which was too bold for a primary characteristic movie. We simply couldn’t persuade one another, nevertheless it was good as a result of it wasn’t the suitable movie to do as a primary movie anyway. I used to be an enormous fan of his and thought he was a tremendous actor.”
When requested concerning the parallels with 2001, the director added: “We do pay homage to loads of science fiction movie, and that’s sort of our 2001 homage. However there’s no level recreating the identical character and making them precisely the identical. In any other case, you actually are simply ripping them off. What I needed to do is for science fiction folks, permit their expectations to be arrange in the beginning of the movie, allow them to make these connections with HAL.”
Labelled as one of many best additions to the notoriously tough style of laborious sci-fi, Moon is a technical masterpiece that poses necessary questions.
