Duncan Jones
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Filmography
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Moon (2009), Source Code (2011), Warcraft (2016)
Themes Characters Visuals Plot
Not coincidentally, at least as regards Moon’s milieu, it’s also the era of philosophically serious science-fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey , Silent Running and Solaris, the influence of which is consciously at work in Moon.
Spacey's voice and inflections are perfect, and clearly modeled on HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," but co-writer and director Duncan Jones has added a nice touch: a smiley face whose expressions change depending on what information Gerty is passing along.
He acknowledges his influences, which are primarily 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Outland and Alien.
Any cinematic space odyssey of the past 40 years surely owes a debt to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; Moon's most obvious debt is the strategic use of a computer that has a cozy name (Gerty to 2001's HAL) and maybe homicidal tendencies.
A refreshingly intelligent and surprisingly polished indie sci-fi film, "Moon" owes equal debts to "The Twilight Zone," "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics, but that doesn't mean it's overly derivative.
Jones draws on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by having Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) run on a treadmill in the stark whiteness of "Mining Base Sarang."
Silent Running (1972)
Directed by Douglas Trumbull
influenced Moon (2009), Source Code (2011)
Themes Plot Visuals
Space is a cold and lonely place, pitiless and indifferent, as Bruce Dern's character grimly realized in Douglas Trumbull's classic " Silent Running ."
The mining operation comes from Outland; the sole man in a space station is like Bruce Dern in Silent Running, talking madly to his plants.
There’s something of a more human 2001 (1968) here and a bit of Silent Running (1972), but comparisons don’t quite do Moon justice, because it’s its own film—and in no small part due to the amazingly nuanced performance of Sam Rockwell.
In a director's statement, he's acknowledged his debt to such cerebral sci-fi classics as Silent Running (1971), Solaris (1972), Outland (1981), and BladeRunner (1982).
While 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) are obvious touchstones, Jones seems more directly inspired by smaller films of the era such as Dark Star (1974) and Silent Running (1972).
This is not sci-fi action like "Terminator Salvation" or the upcoming "Transformers 2." Instead it's a more contemplative genre piece like the 1972 film "Silent Running."
Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced Mute (2018), Moon (2009), Source Code (2011)
Themes Visuals
Though Jones doesn't mention Bowie's work as an influence, he credits films like Kubrick's 1968 "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- "Blade Runner" and "Outland" are others -- as touchstones as he was working on the story upon which Nathan Parker would base the screenplay.
Director Duncan Jones also taps into the visual style of "Silent Running," which was directed by special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull (who worked on "2001" as well as "Blade Runner").
Zowie Bowie, David's son), is a welcome throwback to philosophically interesting science fiction films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner.
"Moon" borrows liberally from "Alien," "2001" and "Blade Runner" to forge an actor's showcase for Sam Rockwell.
Though it poses questions of the existential sort (see also: Kubrick’s movie as well as Blade Runner and both Solarises), it does so in ways that are remarkably moving and concrete.
There is also a connection to Blade Runner (though not in terms of mood, structure or look).
Groundhog Day (1993)
Directed by Harold Ramis
influenced Source Code (2011), Warcraft (2016), Moon (2009)
Plot
It's an unapologetically off-kilter premise that's employed to consistently watchable effect by Jones, as the filmmaker, working from Ben Ripley's screenplay, does an effective job of balancing the Groundhog Day-esque central storyline with the inherently compelling mystery behind Colter's situation (ie how did he get into that pod and what's the deal with the folks responsible for the technology?)
What emerges is a film that mixes elements of old fashioned mystery narratives with the concepts from Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day and Chris Marker’s La jetée, which was more directly the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
Directed by Duncan Jones , writer-director of the 2009 BAFTA award winning Moon, Source Code doesn’t shy away from its spiritual cousin Groundhog Day.
“Source Code” will bring back memories of such unusual inspirations as “Groundhog Day” and “24,” but it mostly feels to this critic like what a classic thriller director like Alfred Hitchcock would have done with an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
Among Source Code’s many pleasures—which include a swiftly-paced 90-minute runtime, welcome dashes of humor and general Alfred Hitchcock-meets-The Twilight Zone-meets Groundhog Day vibe—is the general refusal by Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley to engage in any clunky exposition.
In this case, screenwriter Ben Ripley has filched from the best, delivering a taut, mostly well-crafted race against the clock that combines the time-loop conceit of “Groundhog Day” and the postwar paranoia of “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Jones's debut, which had its local premiere at the last Tribeca Film Festival, is pleased to engage genre behemoths—2001, Solaris, Blade Runner—as well as B-movie classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But since we spend so much time in a kind of “2001’’-meets-“Solaris’’ scenario, one with its strains of Ray Bradbury, we’re invited to notice how little vision or scope or psychological texture there is in “Moon.’’
Not coincidentally, at least as regards Moon’s milieu, it’s also the era of philosophically serious science-fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey , Silent Running and Solaris, the influence of which is consciously at work in Moon.
The well-placed inclusion of several impossible-to-predict plot twists - courtesy of screenwriter Nathan Parker - ensure that the movie's inevitable transformation from drama to thriller is just about seamless, and it's finally clear that Moon represents one of the most entertaining and flat-out engrossing sci-fi efforts to hit theaters since Steven Soderbergh's woefully underrated 2002 Solaris remake.
Reminiscent of 2002's underappreciated " Solaris " and 2007's " Sunshine ," the film creates a thick pall of dread and despair without the conventional means of tossing evil aliens or supernatural beings into the plot.
His pensive debut feature Moon is an elegy for the thoughtful storytelling of films such as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
It winds up with direct visual echoes of Westworld and Ghost in the Shell , and its tone and setting specifics heavily recall Duncan Jones’ gloriously gritty science-fiction feature Moon .
Rothery, whose prior credits including working on art design on another intelligent SF movie, “Moon,” works at his own pace.
The vibe is a bit like Duncan Jones' Moon , on which Rothery worked, except that George gets to go for bracing runs through the trees instead of being locked in an airtight dwelling with the voice of Kevin Spacey as his only company.
Rothery, a longtime video-game designer (and visual-effects supervisor on the 2009 movie Moon ), delivers on every level.
Production designer/effects creator (“Moon”) turned writer-director Gavin Rothery and star Theo James (“Divergent”) have conjured up a great looking film with some heart, a neat twist or two and that manages to be perfectly watchable, start to finish.
Written and directed by Gavin Rothery, Archive recalls other robot/artificial intelligence movies like Blade Runner , A.I. Artificial Intelligence , and Ex Machina , as well as another movie about a lone man and a robot stuck in a single location: Moon , upon which Rothery worked as a designer and visual effects supervisor.
While 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) are obvious touchstones, Jones seems more directly inspired by smaller films of the era such as Dark Star (1974) and Silent Running (1972).
Moon is an old-fashioned sci-fi movie in the best sense: far more psychological drama than space opera, dispensing with overweening CGI and loud flashy action sequences while harking back to subtler, more ideas-driven entries in the genre such as Solaris, Silent Running and Dark Star.
Sam’s dishevelled appearance and the film’s low budget aesthetic even resembles Dark Star to a degree while thematically Moon also strongly evokes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris .
I, for example, didn't mind the cribbing from 2001 and Solaris and Outland and Alien--it's a picture that knows its roots and knows our expectations, and sometimes (in the case of the HAL-ccenteric GERTY), Nathan Parker's screenplay slyly subverts those assumptions.
That's a great plot twist – right up there with John Hurt's chest buster in Alien .
And if you saw Alien, you know you can't trust big corporations who fund space missions.
He acknowledges his influences, which are primarily 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Outland and Alien.
"Moon" borrows liberally from "Alien," "2001" and "Blade Runner" to forge an actor's showcase for Sam Rockwell.
It’s hard not the look past the strong influence of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey and Scott’s Alien, and maybe that’s the point.
Jones, who is David Bowie’s son, explores similar themes to those in his father’s sci-fi classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Bowie, you may recall, once starred in a film called "The Man Who Fell to Earth." "Moon" should have been called "The Movie That Fell to Earth With a Thud."
(In this way it's reminiscent of "The Man Who Fell to Earth," a similarly temperate film in which Jones' father, David Bowie, starred more than 30 years ago.)
Except for the gung ho Star Wars crew, film spacemen were suddenly a lonely breed: Robert Duvall's character in THX 1138 (1970), Bruce Dern's plant-watering loner in Silent Running (1971), the fantasy-prone cosmonaut in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), and David Bowie's morose alcoholic in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) all slept unhappily or alone.
Oblivion (2013)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
influenced by Moon (2009), Warcraft (2016)
Plot Themes Visuals
It’s disappointing that after a promising start, the big-budget “Oblivion” fails at the kind of twisty tug-of-war stuff a small movie like “Moon” did so memorably.
The movie's not bad for a while, but it's made of spare parts from a lot of other movies, among them "Total Recall," "2001: A Space Odyssey," the "2001" riff "Moon," a certain recent play by Caryl Churchill (can't say; spoiler) and a few others.
To get there, it piggybacks on the likes of " I Am Legend ," " The Matrix ," " Independence Day ," and " Moon ."
It may not be a direct remake of 2001, but boy does it borrow plenty of design and story elements from that movie, as well as from such other sci-fi features as Moon, Wall-E and even Zardoz.
Co-writer-director Joseph Kosinski (“TRON: Legacy”) digs all the way to the back of the refrigerator for “Oblivion,” taking leftover bits of “The Matrix,” “WALL-E,” “2001,” “Moon” and “Planet of the Apes,” among countless other science-fiction classics, and putting them into a slick, shiny and state-of-the-art crock pot.
It calls up fleeting images from things like Star Wars , The Road Warrior , and Top Gun, but more importantly, it borrows at least half the plot from Duncan Jones's amazing, underrated Moon (2009).
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Directed by Doug Liman
influenced by Source Code (2011), Warcraft (2016)
Plot
That premise has generally been compared to a certain Bill Murray comedy, yet it’s perhaps even more reminiscent of the 2011 thriller Source Code, in which a man is sent back in time over and over again to gather the information necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.
There’s a pretty good chance that every review about “Edge of Tomorrow” will reference the 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day” at least once, and that’s because both films feature a very similar plot device, not unlike the one that was also employed in Duncan Jones’ underseen sci-fi thriller, “Source Code.”
Based on the manga All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and adapted for the screen by Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (upcoming James Brown bio-pic Get On Up), Edge of Tomorrow recalls other notable time loop sagas, including Groundhog Day and Source Code in the witty and engaging way it moves its story forward piece by piece.
It isn’t original in the least – at times, it recalls “Starship Troopers,” “Aliens” (Bill Paxton even turns up as a barking drill sergeant), “Independence Day,” “Source Code” and “The Matrix,” with maybe a smidgen of “RoboCop” thrown in.
Based on the novel "All You Need Is Kill" by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, the film has the misfortune of arriving three years after the conceptually similar " Source Code ," wherein a man finds himself living out the same moment in time over and over as he attempts to prevent a calamitous tragedy from occurring.
“Edge of Tomorrow” will inevitably be compared to “Source Code” and “Groundhog Day,” but it has more in common with a particularly shrewd episode of TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” called “Cause and Effect.”
While it doesn’t exactly re-invent the concept seen in similar films like Edge of Tomorrow , Looper , and Source Code , Boss Level brings something fresh to the table by virtue of instilling the film with video game sensibilities that will undoubtedly delight hardcore gamers.
The sci-fi Groundhog Day concept is all too familiar ( Edge of Tomorrow , Source Code ), and Carnahan employs a ham-fisted narration device that borders on incessant.
And, even for viewers unacquainted with Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow, the Happy Death Day franchise and Palm Springs, the film always feels as if it's following in better footsteps, including via sci-fi decor that could've stepped right out of Stargate and fight scenes that've taken inspiration from the John Wick series.
At least until 2011, when Duncan Jones' very good Source Code turned up, followed by the wildly entertaining Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt sci-fi actioner Edge of Tomorrow in 2014.
Time-loop movies have become increasingly popular over the years, with the likes of Looper , Source Code , and Palm Springs recent entries.
Without giving too much away, let’s just say Roy is a pawn of some sort of sci-fi experiment involving his ex-wife, Dr. Jemma Wells (Naomi Watts), who is working on a high-level, top-secret techno-project under the paranoid watch of her supervisor, the wild-eyed Col. Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson, and call it typecasting if you must), and suddenly we’re in Time Loop Movie territory similar to “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Source Code.”
The silence and solitude of space bring to mind Duncan Jones’ brilliant “Moon,” and there is a brief, explicit and funny reference to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
"Europa Report" also evokes " Moon ," Duncan Jones's excellent debut feature, in that it accomplishes a lot with a little; on limited resources, it suggests both the claustrophobia of tight, lived-in spaces and the infinity beyond.
Thus, while Europa Report recalls such small-ensemble stuck-in-space flicks as Moon and Sunshine , it's basically The Blair Witch Project relocated to the vicinity of Jupiter.
Cordero makes good use of a relatively light budget (recalling Duncan Jones’ underrated mind-bender “Moon”) and maintains a crisp pace.
The fact that “ Europa Report ” starts on the “Moon” end of the spectrum with its cerebral approach is already commendable; incorporating a found-footage element along the way without succumbing to handheld incoherence feels damn near miraculous.
A quiet, modest chamber piece more like Moon than Star Wars, it's about a crew of six astronauts - four men and two women - undertaking the first manned space mission in history to go beyond the moon.
What emerges is a film that mixes elements of old fashioned mystery narratives with the concepts from Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day and Chris Marker’s La jetée, which was more directly the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
Sort of like “Groundhog Day’’ meets the old French brain-buster “La Jetée’’ (or its big-studio remake, “12 Monkeys’’).
Four years ago, Duncan Jones ’ “Moon” demonstrated what was possible, creatively and commercially, in the realm of minimalist speculative fiction.
Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” “Last Days on Mars” does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.
“The Last Days on Mars” is initially reminiscent of Duncan Jones’ terrific space indie “Moon,” as the crew putters around performing everyday chores and gently bickering.
Robinson is not shy about drawing inspiration from the cream of the genre, including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, though comparison with Duncan Jones’ more recent Moon will be inevitable.
Like Moon , the film's visual construction is—in contrast to any mainstream sci-fi tent pole—spare, drawing power from its locations and quietly matted miniatures, though ultimately it succumbs to powering a series of cheap thrills.
They take it in turns to impart various philosophical musings about missing the green grass of home, harking back to the tone of Solaris and Moon while we explore the effect of the alien environment on their psyches.
Star Wars (1977)
Directed by George Lucas
influenced Moon (2009), Warcraft (2016), Source Code (2011)
Visuals Themes
George Lucas changed that with his barnyard of bug-eyed critters in Star Wars.
The form blossomed for a time after Stanley Kubrick demonstrated its possibilities in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only to be eclipsed a few years later when Star Wars ushered in a cowboys-in-space era.
This is not a Star Wars -inspired space opera (although it is worth mentioning that the effects, such as shots of a rover cruising the moon's surface or a mining vehicle trundling forward, are expertly done); it is intelligent, thought-provoking material.
David Bowie's son Duncan Jones has directed an eccentric sci-fi which cleverly deconstructs the mythology of the Star Treks and Star Wars which have colonised the future of our imaginations with their glamour, self-importance and operatic sound tracks.
The lunar surface in Moon and the machines operating thereupon have a touchable reality and weight to them that I'd take a hundred times for every shiny, smooth vessel in any of your Star Wars prequels or Star Trek reboots.
Jones and his excellent crew, including crackerjack editor Paul Hirsch (whose career has swung wildly from Star Wars to Date Movie , with all kinds of stops in-between), cinematographer Don Burgess, and a phenomenal sound team led by Tom Bellfort, do such an amazing job of keeping the film sizzling along, finding an infinite number of ways to keep the flow between the high-energy scenes on the train and the slow-boil paranoia scenes in the Source Code mission room, that one could almost overlook the human element; certainly it's fairly boilerplate stuff about the power of free will and spirituality and all, but told with a fair degree of conviction, and well-acted, with Monaghan on her best behavior proving to be an outstanding romantic lead for Gyllenhaal; though the movie is rather stolen by Farmiga and Wright in two marvelous supporting performances, hers a subtle masterclass in conflicting emotions, the desire to be a decent, sympathetic person butting against the need to get the job done and be all mili…
In the grand scheme of idiosyncratic robots guiding their human counterparts through futuristic isolation, Byrne’s Mother coaxes uneasy interpretations of the inherently false security of gender (as compared to the immediate distrust one might have for 2001’s Hal or the Kevin Spacey bot in Duncan Jones’ Moon ).
Not only is Alien an obvious touchstone for this sci-fi saga, but so too are The Terminator , Ex Machina , 10 Cloverfield Lane and Moon , among numerous other tales about solitary figures trapped in mysterious bunkers or facilities.
Like Moon or Monsters before it, I Am Mother primarily exists as small-budget sci-fi sizzle ahead of an eventual studio steak plated for its director, Grant Sputore.
Falling somewhere between the accessible entertainment of a YA blockbuster and the complexity of a low-budget indie like Moon , I Am Mother spares the complicated world-building and simply gives Rugaard and Swank plenty of interesting material.
There's 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator , Duncan Jones' Moon , and on and on.
In a director's statement, he's acknowledged his debt to such cerebral sci-fi classics as Silent Running (1971), Solaris (1972), Outland (1981), and BladeRunner (1982).
While 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) are obvious touchstones, Jones seems more directly inspired by smaller films of the era such as Dark Star (1974) and Silent Running (1972).
Moon shows a clear and present influence by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (which has been filmed twice - once in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky and once in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh ).
I'm probably not the first one to make that joke, but in all seriousness it might be fitting, since Bowie's classic song evoked a sense of weightless solitude that was shared by its film contemporary, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as by other science fiction films of that mold, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris -- and the feelings of those quiet, contemplative films are exactly what Jones is paying homage to.
His pensive debut feature Moon is an elegy for the thoughtful storytelling of films such as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
Sam’s dishevelled appearance and the film’s low budget aesthetic even resembles Dark Star to a degree while thematically Moon also strongly evokes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
Approaching the Unknown (2016)
Directed by Mark Elijah Rosenberg
influenced by Moon (2009)
Themes Plot
But if the movie is often derivative — there are also echoes of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” both adaptations of “Solaris,” “Moon,” “Interstellar” and Epcot — the tense scenario can withstand repetition, and seeing it executed on a lower budget, with modest effects, carries its own interest.
Approaching the Unknownisn’t terrible, although it never builds to any sort of desired payoff and there have been so many better movies in this vein—Duncan Jones’ Moon, for example.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare Strong to Sam Rockwell’s performance in Moon or Damon’s own daring Mars escape, but other actors have found themselves in similar predicaments and commanded more attention despite one-man performances.
In a director's statement, he's acknowledged his debt to such cerebral sci-fi classics as Silent Running (1971), Solaris (1972), Outland (1981), and BladeRunner (1982).
And Sam's being a lunar miner is a homage to the 1981 sci-fi film Outland , where Sean Connery blows the whistle on a corrupt mining manager on one of Jupiter's moons.