I am a big fan of Sam Rockwell. I believe he is one of the most underrated actors of his generation despite the fact that he already is generally regarded as being a great actor. That being said, this movie was pretty good, but not fantastic.
For those of you that haven't run away because you've gotten tired of my incessant chatter, you might already be aware that I am extremely impressed by anyone that can pull off acting on their own for long portions of a film. This was deserving of accolades for Tom Hanks in Castaway, and James Franco in 127 hours. It is also deserving of praise for Sam Rockwell in "Moon" as he spends the entire film acting alone. Even when he is interacting with his robot pal GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) his isn't really acting with Spacey.
loved the emoticons on this thing, it reminded me of a particular robot from a famous video game
So the plot goes like this: Sam Bell (Rockwell) is the only human operator at a near-fully-automated facility on the moon that gathers a new type of energy called helium-3. Sam is on a 3-year contract, and is very much looking forward to going home at the end of his tenure. However, towards the end of his time on the moon he starts to experience rapidly diminishing health, including hallucinations that seriously impact his ability to work.
I don't want to spoil the film for anyone out there because I would say this movie is a "maybe" on the list of people out there that want to watch something new. The film moves at a pretty slow pace and that is annoying, but the sci-fi aspects of it are pretty original and I would say definitely see this if you are a fan of the genre.
The film won a bunch of minor awards but was not considered for the major ones such as the Oscars. It also didn't make very much money and was considered a bit of a flop. However, i feel the effects in the film are pretty remarkable when you consider the entire budget was only $5 million. I can't rate it much higher than this because the plot "twist" becomes quite obvious early on and the movie moves pretty slow.