9, 3 stars

Here is an example of why one should never mix new age psychobabble with steampunk aesthetics. (Yes, I'm sure the world was clamoring for more proof that this should not be attempted.) Here is a film that has the look of Little Big Planet and the half-baked plot and ideas of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The plot concerns a group of sentient sack-people who awaken self-aware in a postapocalyptic wasteland. They struggle to understand how they got to this world and why they have been awakened.

I will not give away the ending here, since to do so would be to invite a long diatribe on its new age treacle, but suffice to say it requires a belief in a higher power and an afterlife that I just couldn't summon, particularly not after a buildup so visually interesting as the one that "9" establishes. For about the first 20 minutes of this movie I was entranced by its visual style, which borrowed from "The Triplets of Belleville" and certain Marilyn Manson music videos as well as from the classic steampunk look. However, as I realized there was another hour of the film left and not much substance to fill it, the look of the film suddenly became repetitive and hollow, as I longed for the characters to do something besides engage in another chase sequence or go through labored plot mechanics. Steampunk should not mean that we can hear the gears of the plot creaking.

Moon, 4 stars

Yeah, if I were David Bowie's son I probably would have passed on using "Space Oddity" in this film also. The interest both the song and the film show in space exploration and its strange attractions seems to run in the family, and if Duncan Jones progresses as much through his fledgling film career as his father did through his musical career he will one day be an artist of great interest.

**SPOILERS FOLLOW**

In the meantime we have this, a directorial debut which Jones gets a story credit on. More experienced screenwriters were apparently trusted with the actual screenplay, which shows a remarkable ability to delegate that few first-time directors, drunk with newfound filmmaking power, are able to show. The story concerns Sam (Sam Rockwell) who is the lone employee of a mining base on the moon. He putters around the base doing the sort of vaguely pointless, repetitive activities that men alone in space usually do in films, until one day he crashes a moon rover and awakens back at the base, where a solicitous helper robot (Kevin Spacey) seems genuinely concerned for his recovery. Eventually Sam is up and about, suspiciously missing any injuries sustained in the crash. He goes searching for the missing rover and finds it...with his injured self still inside. What follows I will not spoil entirely for you. It combines elements of "Solaris" with elements of (of all things) "The Island". I leave it to you to decide which parts of which were placed where in this film.

Jones has a talent for directing. His ability to coax two fairly opposite performances from star Sam Rockwell shows promise with actors, and the fact that the audience is occasionally moved to laughter bespeaks a rare ability to change tones without inducing whiplash. He has hired the immensely talented Clint Mansell to score the film, although I was less impressed with Mansell's score here than I was with his work for Darren Aronofsky in "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream". The score wisely chooses to be silent at some pivotal moments and never stoops to the level of "goosing" the audience at surprising points. Jones' directing of the moon-surface scenes are the ones that stand out to me most, a week and a half after seeing the movie. It is sometimes hard to tell if we are seeing miniatures or full-scale moon rovers and antennae, but that adds to the otherworldly idea of a future where mining on the moon is so simple that one man can do it. This is an austere, haunting vision of a future which makes me wish we could clone Duncan Jones and replace so many careless, lazy directors working today.