Moon

Sometimes I feel that the timeline of my life can be broadly broken down into thematic sections. The year of 2008 was one that was spent largely on figuring out why one ought to be ethical or moral when there may or may not be such a thing as divine retribution. In that patchwork of movies, momentary inspirations and misadventures, I concluded that morals and ethics preserve our sanctity and humanity. They exist to keep society from turning on itself and to prevent individuals from using each other as a means to an end. There is nothing inherently wrong about anybody’s ’immoral’ or ‘unethical’ action because we would be hardpressed to find a single, absolute standard to measure them. Nevertheless, the best gauge of what could be a desirable set of law for all of humanity would be one where everyone do not mind being subjected to at any one time. It would be like the idealistic Kantian model of categorical imperative.

 

Thus far, 2009 seems to be a year where I struggle to define what is to be human.  And the latest addition to the list of influences is Duncan Jones latest creation ‘Moon’. Here’s quoting from user ‘freemantle’ on the IMDB website about what the film is about:

 

In Duncan Jones’ vision of the future, the world’s energy needs are solved by mining the moon for helium-3 which can be used for nuclear fusion. Living on the dark side of the moon is Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who is coming to the end of a 3 year contract. He has lived in isolation, with only GERTY (Kevin Spacey), a robot who is programmed to serve him. His only contact from the outside world is video messages from his wife (Dominique McElligott) and the company. When one of the mining machines suffers some damage Sam goes out to fix it. However, after seeing images he crashes and wakes up after in the infirmary. GERTY tells Sam he is under orders no to let out the base and he has to trick the robot before being allowed out. In the open spaces of the moon Sam finds another version of himself. Both falls quickly into conflict, both arguing they are the real Sam and the other is a clone. But both also know something wider and darker is happening and they need to solve it before a rescue team arrive.

 

‘Moon’ in 2009 reminds me a lot of what ‘Little Children’ had been to me in 2008 – a profound experience that really pushes me to understand what exactly is meant by humanity/morality. Just as how Little Children leads the audience to slowly give concession as to what is morally permissible, Moon carefully leads the audience to empathise with the clones of sam rockwell. It was such a natural progression that when the audience realise the truth about the situation, they struggle to really see them as anything less than human. Even GERTY, the AI robot which detects impeccably minor fluctuations sam’s emotions and which volunteered to violate protocols on a few occasion so as to help sam, causes serious dissonance. If artificial intelligence has been perfected to such an extent where it can fully mimick the entire spectrum of human emotions and respond empathetically to a follow human being, can we really say that it is just a man-made robot? How is it so different from us, whose mechanisms of emotions and experience is much less understood than a robot?

 

Of late, I realised that I’m a science-fiction convert. Questions about humanity future has never been more poignantly explored than in good sci-fi.