The Last Movie I Saw

Back in the mid-eighties I belonged to an organization called the North American Radio Archive, or NARA for short. The main perk of being a member was that you could rent tapes of old radio programs from the group's massive library, and I indulged deeply. I would peruse their catalog looking for more episodes of favorites like Fred Allen or Vic & Sade, but once I exhausted those I started to request programs that I knew nothing about just to see what they were like. One of my favorite discoveries was the science fiction show from the 1950s that started out as Dimension X, but later became X Minus 1. These were latter-day old time radio, produced well after most comedy and drama had migrated to television, but they retained all the elements of the classic era, creating masterful theater of the mind by turning short stories by writers like Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein into audio-only broadcasts. The greatness of the series was in focusing on character and psychology, pitting its spacemen, scientists, and ordinary folks against emotional, physical, and intellectual challenges that were exacerbated by the futuristic or intergalactic conditions that were key to the show's premise, but ultimately not the main point. In the 1950s when the program was produced, it was easy to recognize how the current conditions (things like the Cold War, nuclear arms race, social conformity and civil rights) were deeply integrated into the scripts, making them more than simple escapist fantasy.

Moon, directed by Duncan Jones and starring the fantastic Sam Rockwell strikes me as a throwback to the kinds of stories encountered on X Minus 1. While most Hollywood sci-fi these days seems to obsess over the hardware, or trying to concoct the most revolting looking aliens, this film is firmly planted in the psyche of its protagonist. Rockwell's situation raises questions that are similar if not identical to many that we as a society are collectively working out right now, related to issues like energy and social engineering-- questions that we'd like to believe will be resolved by the time when the movie takes place. It's a gripping and ultimately highly satisfying film, despite falling short in the Wham! Pow! comic-booky sort of action found in something like Star Trek (not a bad movie in itself, but lacking the depth I associate with great science fiction). It's the kind of movie that stays with you after leaving the theater, and sadly, there just aren't enough of those anymore, especially during the summer blockbuster season.