Movie Review: Moon

Five noncommercial movie showings between now and next broadcast starting with two tonight, at 7 p.m. Tallgrass is continuing its third Thursday series with Fuel, a documentary with discussion following, about the energy crisis and various approaches to solving it, some of which may surprise you: do you know what a vertical farm is? You can find out tonight, 7 p.m., in the Warren East Theatre on east 13th. Or you could go to the Orpheum and see the science fiction classic Aliens, with Sigourney Weaver battling the big insect again, under the direction of James Cameron, also at 7. Tomorrow night, the Laural and Hardy fan club strikes again, with Robert Youngson's compilation of silent comedy 30 Years of Fun and Haunted Spooks, starring Harold Lloyd, at 6:30 in Calvary Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road. Sunday, the Mid-Kansas Jewish Federation will show how a celebration of the life of a deceased man leads to, quote, "a circus of conflicts and characters," including a mariachi band a couple of Yiddish-speaking spirit commentators; it's called My Mexican Shivah, and the showing is at 3 Sunday in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway. And finally, the ever-faithful Blank Page gallery at 917 West Douglas will show Michelangelo Antonioni's puzzling classic L'Aventurra at 7:30 Tuesday. Six movies, five programs, four days: let's hear no more about the lack of screen fare in Wichita, at least for a week.

And commercially, we have a quite unusual science fiction movie not aimed at the adolescent lover of special effects and space war in Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, Sam Rockwell again, and the voice of Kevin Spacey.

Since one of the people at the Blank Page asked me whether this was the one about the astronaut who finds his own corpse on the moon, evidently on information from publicity, I assume I am not telling too much if I mention this much of the plot. I don't want to tell you much more than that, because Moon is not a bang-bang with something violent every few minutes; it's leisurely paced and atmospheric, featuring mystery and suspense instead of a lot of action. In fact, the plot is so basically simple that it resembles an elongated episode of Twilight Zone and may not please fans of Transformers and its clones. But I was engulfed in curiosity and suspense from the first moments, and never figured out what was going out until the movie told me at the very end. But at no time did I doubt that something quite logical, though also very nasty and dangerous, was going on, and the hole I thought I had found in the plot was explained by a group of fellow watchers quite easily: the solution was so simple that I had completely overlooked it in search of something sophisticated. The same group of watchers gave Moon a range of ratings: one "okay, I guess," two threes, and three maximum fours. I might mention that all of these were people long past their teen years, and they seemed to agree with me that Moon is sufficiently different from most science-fictioners that it is not likely to enjoy a long run. But it looks like that rare thing, a good low-budget science-fiction movie, and I hope it serves as harbinger of more of the same.

What special effects there are, primarily a matter of robotic mining on the moon, are first-rate, aimed at reality, or the impression of reality, rather than spectacle; the interior of the moon station looks like a lot of other sci-fi interiors, but simpler, as the situation justifies; computer screens are kept to a minimum, so we don't have screenfuls of flashing numbers such as so many sci-fi fans are supposed to crave.

Transformer fans may or may not be excited by Moon; but I would liek to see it win an audience of its own.