Many of the best survival-oriented movies work like a line of dominoes: their best bits catalyze one another, the action of one is impossible without the drama of another. In Uncut Gems (2019), a lightly disguised survival film, each and every action by Howard (Adam Sandler) is a reaction to, cover-up of, or parlay based on his last action. His survival in the world of sports gambling depends on his ability to respond to the present situation accordingly. Howie gives his precious opal to the Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett, takes the latter’s championship ring as collateral, and then pawns the ring short-term to ameliorate his immediate financial situation. With every subsequent decision, Howie knocks into the next like a train of dominoes initiated from this basic predicament.
Kim Yong Hwa’s The Moon superficially has a similar feeling to Uncut Gems: in the near future, the protagonist repeatedly and quickly finds himself trapped in a series of impossible situations with only bad outcomes to be found. Stranded in space, alone, and not knowing how to fly the spaceship, Sun-woo (Do Kyung-soo) first faces a strong solar wind that damages the ship and causes the death of his crew mates; after the solar wind, a series of natural disasters and bad luck rue all escape or rescue plans. The inciting events, while technically (occasionally) related to one another (the communications are down because of the solar wind), depend on dramatics that are largely unrelated to each previous incident. Each scene feels like an interchangeable episode, insertable into almost any part of the film while only changing a few incidental details.
The major exception to this is when Sun-woo decides to move forward with the moon landing as both a nationalistic gesture and as an act of repentance for his father, who was a scientific leader five years earlier on a mission that resulted in the death of three crew members and was a national embarrassment. The Moon eventually loses its good favor and begins to feel like a hodgepodge of dangerous scenarios that a collection of studio executives forced into the final product, never coming up for air and sacrificing the good of the whole film for a series of exciting individual parts.
And at least one of those parts is pretty damn well put together. The meteor shower on the far side of the moon showcases some brilliant coordination between the visual effects departments and the cinematographer. The meteors crash with a range of velocities, with the slower meteors appearing almost like fireworks in their explosive impacts. In similar scenes in peer films, like the 2018 Norwegian The Quake, slow-motion might be used to zero in on a particular piece of dangerous debris but the entire frame, more often than not, would be slowed down: not just individual elements. In the long extended scene on the moon, Sun-woo narrowly dodges the crashing space rocks in his lunar rover and travels at a relatively consistent speed. Kim adds to the design of the scene by putting together the storm with the randomness of a Stan Brakhage visual, likely the result of very carefully deliberated visual effects supervision. In any particular frame, two meteors might hit the surface surrounding Sun-woo at very different velocities. One might make a slower impact, comparable to a flowering firework, and the other might look more like a streak of heavy hail guided by the quick hand of gravity. The grunt work artistry makes the scene into something remarkable.
NASA—with a crew composed of a Canadian, an American, a Brit, and an Australian—eventually helps coordinate the rescue mission for Sun-woo alongside the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). The collaboration is facilitated, or perhaps brokered, by a Korean worker at NASA who puts her job on the line to secure the collaboration (Kim Hee-ae as Moon Young). Of course, there was only ever one account for the melodramatic space film: the rescue of the stranded astronaut. I can’t help but find the nationalistic framing a bit ironic considering South Korea has never actually landed on the moon (and hence, why the film is set in 2029). The patriotic space-race cinema of the Soviet Union, Russian Federation, China, United States, and Japan all make a bit more sense given their successful space programs than this pretend soft power demonstration from South Korea. Isn’t it all a bit counterintuitive?
The Moon
2023
dir. Kim Yong Hwa
129 min.
Now playing in theaters (though nowhere locally, it seems)
