Moon

I really liked this one. Sam Rockwell plays a man on a three year contract to mine on the dark side of the moon all by himself. The beginning was slow and played like a light comic version of "The Shining", but as the story unfolded I realized all of the boredom was there to set up later developments. So he gets injured and then he gets rescued by the robot running the place (Kevin Spacey doing a creepy, but more humanistic HAL). But it turns out this is not the first Sam. This is a clone. And he rescues the original Sam. But each one thinks the other is Sam. Eventually it dawns on them that it is more likely that they are both clones. They are genetically designed to live for a three year contract and then they are euthanized. They have synthetic memories about a woman who is long dead that they believe is their wife. And they are driven by the belief that they are going home one day. Rockwell is simply magnificent in the dual role. The film explores a lot of interesting themes - what is self, how do we deal with the inevitability of death, what are memories, what does it mean to go home. And a lot of this is done in subtle, very nuanced scenes where what is really going on isn't discussed, but the pace of the film leaves time to ponder these concepts. I also thought it was masterfully done to have Rockwell in a dual role without it ever feeling "Patty Duke"-esque. It's a spartan production that really packs a wallop. My only quibble is that it felt as if the evil corporation had gone to a lot of work to set up this cloning thing, but it wasn't entirely clear what they needed a human out there for at all. But once I let that go, I thought it was a great film.