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Rick Marshall (Ferrell), who calls himself a quantum paleontologist, has been working on a tachyon meter - it looks like a boom box - that will puncture the space-time continuum. The world laughs at Rick, perhaps because he loves show tunes. But someone believes in him: sexy British scientist Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel), who has found the imprint of his lighter in a rock that's millions of years old. She takes him to the desert area where she found it, and after bumping into the obligatory rude dude, a souvenir salesman named Will (Danny McBride), they all go sliding down...
...Just from this synopsis of Moon, a searching and worthy first feature by Brit fashion maven Duncan Jones, you'll glean that the writer-director has maybe watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey once or twice, and is familiar with the stories of SF master Philip K. Dick, who wrote frequently about guys who don't realize they're robots. But Jones, 38, isn't just riffling these oeuvres in order to riff on them. He's long been fascinated by the evolving identity of man in the cyber-era. In 1995, as a philosophy major...
...also must raise the matter of Jones' pedigree - he is the son of David Bowie, and as a child was called Zowie Bowie - but only because there is an tantalizing connection between a song of the father and the film of the son. Bowie's Space Oddity, from 1969, takes its punning title from the Kubrick movie the year before. Released nine days before the Apollo 11 moon landing, and played by the BBC in its coverage of the event, it describes the communication of a lonely astronaut: "This is Major Tom to Ground Control... / Here am I sitting...
...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...
...takes place in a fantasy present, where the Dow is at 11,000 - a relic of that halcyon era of 2008, when the movie was shot. And by emphasizing the cop-killer relationship, the picture loses the original's busy fresco of New Yawk types. Pushing, complaining, invading the space of the movie's stars, they were the graffiti in this subway docudrama...