Word: sam
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...Earth scientists have discovered a way to solve the planet's energy crisis: harvest an element called helium-3 from the Moon. Apparently this vast effort requires only one human: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who's nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone in a station on the lunar surface. All that time alone, with only a talking computer and some old TV shows as company, has made Sam edgy; he can't wait to be picked up and taken back to Earth, to his loving wife and child. His anxiety escalates to horror when he discovers...
...Jones adds to this familiar elements from many a space epic or action movie. Sam might be the cop who is just days from a well-earned retirement, and who is bound to get bumped off so the hero can avenge him. There's also the ticking-clock mechanism of an expedition that's coming to fetch Sam, and the private multinational corporation, Sam's employer, that simply must have nefarious motives. Yet the movie isn't interested in suspense tricks or conspiracy theories so much as in investigating Sam's mind/body problem: he has a surplus of the latter...
...Like the 2001 astronauts, Sam has a chatty computer, named Gerty, which comes equipped with a metallic arm, as in the arcade claw games, three expressions (smiley-face, frowny-ace and deadpan) and the would-be soothing voice of Kevin Spacey. Like Socrates or a rabbi or a shrink, Gerty annoyingly answers questions with questions. (Sam, agitated: "Am I a f---in' clone?" Gerty, trying to deflect the issue: "Are you hungry?") Unlike HAL-9000 from the Kubrick movie, however, this computer is not totally the slave of his programmers. Sometimes it will aid Sam as he rises from impotence...
...Mind, Rockwell has honed his specialty of runty ranters. His standard character is the kind of highly caffeinated punk who, in any group, would be voted most likely to screw up the mission. He brings some of that chip-on-shoulder orneriness to Moon - at times you wonder how Sam aced the screening process and got the job - and to the second Sam, a Top Gun-type who fulminates while the first one mewls. But there's a tenderness, too, in Rockwell's depiction, from the inside, of a man out of his shallows, one little guy against the whole...
...grimy and the trackside views uninspiring. Yet Ayutthaya provides an eye-cleansing surplus of green after days in Bangkok's concrete maze (at admission prices that, while annoyingly higher for foreigners, are still minimal by world standards). Its sculptures and chedi ooze grandeur, not rot. And the Chao Sam Phraya leads the most impressive array of museums found in the country - worth much more than a day. Get a crack at meditation upon the ages: Ayutthaya is a mini-Angkor with one-tenth the crowds...