Moon’s One (Million)-Man Dystopia | Home

Moon (2009) Sony Pictures

Moon (2009) is set in the near future when mankind has solved its energy crisis by harvesting a resource trapped on the moon’s surface. One man is in charge of administrating the mining machines, but just as his three-year contract is ending, he discovers he isn’t alone.

Moon opens with an advertisement that paints its world as a utopia – a post-scarcity society that has overcome its struggles, set aside inequities and mended division of the past.

While we don’t see much of Earth in the movie, even with the most generous interpretation of the ad, Moon is a classic Dystopia disguised as a Utopia.

Moon’s protagonist, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) appears to be an average blue-collar worker. He supports his wife and newborn child on a three-year remote work contract that just happens to be on the moon. These kinds of conditions are not out of the ordinary with many industries offering “2 and 2” jobs (2 weeks work living on-site, 2 weeks home). Considering the time it would take to travel to and from the moon, long-term contract work sounds both realistic and appropriate.

But Sam Bell is not an average person. To some he’s not even a person at all. After an accident in the field, Sam Bell discovers that another Sam exists on the moon alongside him. Together with his doppelganger, Sam finds out that they are clones of an original Sam Bell who donated his DNA to serve an endless sentence of labour 340,000 kilometres away from society. When Sam’s three-year contracts come to an end, Lunar Industries vaporises the clone and wakes the next replacement.

A common critique of the common Utopia is, “A Utopia for whom, at whose expense?” Moon uses its story to question the human cost of a post-scarcity society, and in doing so it criticises our Western lives at the expense of the workers enabling them. As Margaret Atwood said of her Dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, “There’s nothing in the book that didn’t happen, somewhere.” Likewise, Moon draws on real-world cases of worker exploitation, classism, and corporate greed that exists in society today, such as the very real and criminal “passport confiscation” which puts workers in vulnerable positions where they become unable to seek help or leave the country – effectively turning them into slaves of their employers.

As with other Ideological Dystopias of the past, emphasis is put on the isolation Sam Bell feels once he realises he is not part of the accepted class. Just as with Bladerunner‘s (1982) replicants, Sam is a solution for corporations to benefit. As capable as humans. As loving as humans. But not human in the eyes of society.

Clean, renewable energy such as that imagined in Moon would undoubtedly be a benefit to society, but its creators ask the viewer to be critical when examining who offers the solutions to our problems.

While harvesting and utilising Helium-3 is a high-tech, futuristic solution to our problems, the more prominent technology under the surface is one used only to manufacture the oppression of Sam Bell – The cloning technology that traps him in endless three-year loops of hope and grief. If it wasn’t for Lunar Industry’s bottom line it would simply be a machine for torture. The way clones are vaporised and replaced reflects the sense of replacability and lack of job security many of us feel today.

Challenges to Dystopia: Critical Utopia, or an Opportunity.

While the film is largely dystopic, there is a hope between the relationship developed by Sam I and Sam II. At first they see each other as a challenge to their own humanity – “If that guy exists, who the hell am I?”
But they eventually realise that as a collective they’re capable of more than they were individually. The Sam Bells collaborate on a plan to emancipate their descendants from the chains of oppression. Like 2018’s Sorry To Bother You or 1999’s The Matrix, Sam exists in a dystopia with a seemingly no hope for freedom, but through collective action there is hope that he and Sam 2’s sacrifices will bring their oppressors, Lunar Industries, to justice.

Ultimately the question of dystopia or utopia lies in perspective. Whether you call it an Ideological Dystopia or Critical Utopia, the fact is that Moon is a critique of late-stage capitalism. It highlights the cost-cutting measures taken to make maximise corporate profits, and offers workers of the world to reject our current situation and demand better outcomes.