Moon (2009): My Favorite Sci-Fi Horror Revenant Tragedy Bromance (yes, really)

The next tech revenant movie I want to think about is the relatively niche but absolutely brilliant film Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, and directed by Duncan Jones. Yes, I’ve written about this film before, but I have to do it again, because it’s that good. Plus, it’s the only tech-revenant horror story I’m aware of in which we are trained, meticulously, by the film to have profound, aching empathy for the revenants themselves. Here’s the story.

There’s a man named Sam (Rockwell) who works on the moon, totally alone except for a robotic helper named Gertie (Kevin Spacey). Sam’s job is to operate rovers, mine resources, and maintain the moon station, while attending as best he can to his own sanity. He receives recorded messages from his wife and daughter from time to time, but he clearly misses them terribly. The good news is that his three-year gig on the moon is two weeks from being over, and Sam is very, very eager to go home, because, despite the company he gets from the robotic Gertie, he’s crushed by loneliness.

But as he prepares to debark for earth, things start to go wrong. Eventually, he crashes his moon rover and loses consciousness. We think he somehow makes it back to the base, where Gertie tends to him, because the next scene shows him in the infirmary. Days pass with him in the infirmary. We don’t know how many. Sam wakes up, shuffles out, and hears Gertie talking to the corporation. He gets suspicious that something strange is afoot. He sneaks off the station, to check on the rover he apparently crashed. In the rover, he discovers his own doppelganger, who turns out to be the Sam we began the film with. I’ll call him Sam 1. Sam 2 brings that Sam 1 back to tend to his injuries in the medlab on the moon base. When the two Sams meet, they are understandably suspicious of each other, each thinking the other is his clone. But Sam 1 and Sam 2 start interacting in spite of their suspicion; Sam 1 seems increasingly decrepit, while Sam 2 looks and acts remarkably like Maverick from the original Top Gun (even wears aviator sunglasses indoors—a very nice touch). Sam 1’s body is clearly damaged and deteriorating rapidly. He’s getting weaker by the day. He soon appears febrile—pale and sweaty. But somehow, despite the manifest surreality and eeriness of their situation, he and Sam 2 start bonding. A quiet tenderness emerges between them, made all the stranger and more powerful once Sam 1 and Sam 2 both come to understand that they are not real humans, but rather clones of an original Sam—a source Sam, as it were, like the source Joan from Joan is Awful—who lives on earth with his daughter (his wife having died some years before.) Sam 1 is a clone. He’s probably not the first clone, because it appears that the “three-year contract” he’s been told he’s serving up on the moon is actually just the lifespan of each individual clone. After that period, each clone breaks down and is summarily incinerated by the company. Sam 1 stars having nosebleeds. His connective tissue is breaking down—much as the Schwarzennator’s did in Terminator. Soon, Sam 1 can barely walk. He looks like a zombie, but he’s not a zombie, because he has something no zombie ever has: a caregiver who can help ease him into his final repose.

Sam 2 carries him to bed, tucks him in. This part of the movie is beautiful and devastating. Sam 2 clearly loves Sam 1, and is grieving over his decline, which, of course, augurs Sam 2’s own decline as well, three years hence. Sam 2 is getting what no human being ever gets to have: the chance to see their own death play out in real time, while they are still alive enough to make new choices in view of what they learn. Together, the Sams make a plan to jettison Sam 1 back to earth, surreptitiously, before the clean-up crew from the company arrives to facilitate the transition to the new Sam. Sam 2 wants Sam 1 to get a chance to meet Eve, the daughter who is both of theirs, but also neither of theirs—Schrödinger’s child. She, they have learned, is a “memory implant” that they both share, but that doesn’t dampen either of their love for her. Nor does it dampen Sam 2’s altruistic desire to give Sam 1—and not himself—the chance to see this little girl before he “dies.”

The meaning and purpose of both Sams’ lives have been artificially created by a corporation, to facilitate their mining operation. The Sams are created to have shelf-lives of three years. It’s a heart-wrenching film: who would ever create life, only to let it do mindless work for a period of time, and then die, on a clock? On a rock, in the middle of space? Oh, wait. That’s, like, a chillingly accurate and existentially dreadful description of regular human life, too. The only obvious differences are a. that our experiences and memories are really our own, b. the clock we live on is about 80 years, rather than three, and c. the rock we live on is the earth, not the moon.

But really, the big difference—the difference that really matters—is that we do our labor time on this green and blue rock with other people, loved ones, family, friends, strangers, history, world events, strangers, animals, everything! Our brief passage here is given meaning by the simple fact that we do not pass through alone, unseen, unrecognized, unloved, unrecorded by history. The Sams have none of that. They are profoundly and totally alone. Isolated from all real human contact for the whole duration of their lives. This film is an extraordinary essay on human loneliness—agonizing, actually. And remember: it routes that loneliness through cyborg replicants of an original human. These replicants just keep dying and dying, and yet, at the same time, they are never truly dead, because they are constantly being remade, and were never truly “alive” in the first place, in the sense of being truly human. It is a fascinating philosophical revision to the usual moves of the revenant genre, not least because, in this film, we are made, in effect, to empathize with the revenant—the knock-off shell being that is patterned off of a primary original, but has no soul of its own. Sam is like an Afro-Caribbean zombi of the past, except there are infinite recursive versions of him, so that he’s not only trapped as a laborer for this lifetime, but for every imaginable lifetime, on and on in a cascade, potentially forever.

Sam 1 eventually realizes he can’t go to earth to see Eve. He’ll scare her; he’s decomposing, dying, and not in good shape at all. He really does look like a zombie. So he tells Sam 2 to go in his place; that way, at least one replicant Sam, in all of history, will have a chance at a proper, real life, and a chance at a connection with a real human being. Sam 2 reluctantly agrees, but first he helps ease Sam 1 into his final resting place, back in the crashed rover where Sam 2 had found him. As Sam 1 prepares to die, they share memories—their implanted ones, of course—for a few minutes, before Sam 1 falls asleep, and Sam 2 leaves him, forever. Nothing about Sam 1’s memories or his past life is real. He’s simply one revenant incarnation of the Sam paradigm, and he knows it as he slips into oblivion. Sam 1 will die, alone, on the moon, nursing memories that he knows are not his own, until he disintegrates, perhaps over thousands of years, into nothing and rejoins the stardust from which we all, after all, originate—humans and revenants alike. I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever seen a more plangent sci-fi horror scene than this one.

Sam 2 then jettisons himself from the moon base down to earth. And in the final moments of the film, we learn that he becomes an activist, who takes down the corporation for unethical practices, and halts the practice of corporate cloning. Sam 2 writes his way into shared, human history, and he advocates for that history to be more humane, going forward. And he advocates for his own position in history—to be seen as a being, not as a thing. As something closer to a human than to a cyborg. He also shares the story of Sam 1, who is therefore also retroactively made “real,” in the sense of being brought into history and into the consciousness of other people. Even though Sam 1—like all the other Sams before him—died alone in outer space, his death was not unrecorded or unmourned. It is a beautiful, redemptive ending to an otherwise totally unremitting study of existential dread and loneliness.

So I want to think a little bit more about how it happened—about how Sam 1 and Sam 2 escaped the fates of the other Sams. Because that how speaks to the specific nature of the tech revenant horror of this film. The simple answer is that they met each other. Which is to say, they acquired self-knowledge through interaction with another being. But more than that, they acquired self-knowledge which they sublimed into interpersonal compassion. They looked at each other, felt initial alienation, and then that alienation softened into camaraderie, recognition, compassion, and affection. Sams 1 and 2 went from being alone to being a dyad; that experience enabled them, although clones, to form real new memories of human interaction with another being who was also identical with themselves. They develop empathy, then, simultaneous with self-love; they develop understanding of another, in tandem with self-awareness. Through connection with another self, the clones become fully human, fully in possession of their own selfhoods. It’s a beautiful film, a beautiful idea.

And it echoes rather loudly with the dynamics at work in The Girl with All the Gifts: there, Melanie reaches her highest psychological evolution by learning to have compassion for the other “monsters” who are just like her, in whose monstrosity she can see herself reflected, and in whose need for compassion she can learn to love herself and value her own life. Just as in Girl with All the Gifts, here, part of the psychological efflorescence comes through a commitment to teaching. Melanie teaches the other “monsters” how to speak, how to learn, how to gain knowledge of their world and of themselves. The dynamic between the Sams is the same: Sam 1 teaches Sam 2 how to whittle. Sam 2 helps Sam 1 around the station. There is a dynamic of care between them; they essentially parent each other, though in different ways. In fact, it’s almost like Sam 1 is Sam 2’s father—teaching him skills and helping him grow up—until Sam 1 is too old to do so anymore, and then Sam 2 steps into the role of an adult child, helping an elderly parent die with dignity. Kindness, compassion. From a cyborg. From a replicant. From a knock-off. Moon wants us to be terrified about tech revenance not because the revenants might hurt us, but because we might fail to recognize the moment at which the sentient machine is no longer just a sentient machine, but a person.

This particular thread of tech revenant horror is one I fully expect to get louder and louder in the next ten years or so, as people have more and more contact with AI interfaces, and as more and more people come to contain AI elements—medical devices, for instance—within their own bodies. Perhaps the way through the tech revenant horror is to invite the machines into the fellowship of humanity, rather than debarring them from it.