A short mention of this wonderful film “Moon”, which is presently in the theaters here and there. I quite enjoyed the production design — Tom Carden pointed me to the site of the designer who created the fictional environment, giving the film a particularly lonely and somewhat constrained feeling to it, a fellow called Gavin Rothery. It seems he worked on quite a bit of the production design and visual effects, which is quite impressive.
Most of what I learned about the film and its production was found on Rothery’s site as well as a radio interview with Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son!), the film’s director on the NPR show “Science Friday.”.
An intriguing premise of the film, set on the Moon in a vague near future, is this design fiction in which helium 3 is mined from the far side of the moon and then sent back to earth at regular intervals. The material is mined in a semi-autonomous fashion, with one guy — a sort of blue collar near future industrial worker — minding the shop, together with this robot/ship computer with an articulated arm, Kevin Spacey’s voice, and a smiley face icon for a emotive display, which is intriguing. This is only the second example of a computer voice in a science-fiction film that is a man I can think of besides HAL. But, I could be wrong. Most of them seem to be women — more on this at a later post. But it won’t be a rant.)
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