We aren’t supposed to have movies like Moon anymore. They went away a long time ago in the Great Sci-Fi Purge of the early 1980s. These thoughtful character studies and simple space allegories used to crowd the marketplace in the 1970s, as every would-be Kubrick worth his salt attempted to copy or further explicate on the prodigious themes of 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst carving out an entity all its own. A lot of them failed, and often rightfully so, but they had class, and they had their own grainy style to back up their game attempts to find a new cinematic language for confronting society. The 1980s had many casualties, and this sort of smart, reasonably artistic entertainment for adults was probably the biggest. Youth growing up today might take it for granted that science fiction has always been a middleweight genre for fluffy summer fun, but this has not always been so. Once upon a time, science fiction was a highly personal realm. Often great (Kubrick). Often awful (Ed Wood). Widely fluctuating and seldom simply “mediocre”. But, through thick and thin, it was always personal. Continue reading →