‘Moon’ Shot
You know what they say. The moon is made of cheese … I’ll just leave that there.
The Moon
Director: Kim Yong-hwa • Writer: Kim Yong-hwa
Starring: Sol Kyung-gu, Doh Kyung-soo, Hong Seung-hee, Kim Hee-ae, Park Byung-eun, Jo Han-chul, Choi Byung-mo
South Korea • 2hrs 10mins
Opens Hong Kong September 28 • IIA
Grade: C
Remember how the joy of The Martian was in the competency of it all? How Mark Watney’s declaration to “science the shit” out of his dire circumstances was such a blast of refreshing push-back on the anti-intellectualism that’s been sweeping the globe it brought tears to your eyes?
This is not that.
Kim Yong-hwa’s The Moon | 더 문 prefers to trade in ridiculousness up and down. It’s not ridiculous that a Korean space agency could get to the moon; KARI and KASI are real things, and take a look around your office and/or living room. Koreans are kinda good at tech. What is ridiculous is the idea that a Korean space agency would staff itself with overly-emotional, unhinged, dumb-asses that border on incompetent. Somewhere, a Korean astrophysicist is sitting in their lab grinding their teeth and snapping pencils in barely contained rage.
The dumbness of The Moon – though it falls well short of the idiocy of the traumatising Moonfall – is in direct negative correlation to its production standards. This looks like a million bucks. Space is eerily quiet. Mission control has a vaguely retro, low-fi vibe that belies the ultra-high tech activities going on in the room. The surface of the moon is a gorgeously dusty, weightless monochrome. If Kim had demanded the same level of character and story detail from his own script he might have been on to something. Instead, we get astronauts we want to slap and a mission control centre that has no idea who it takes orders from.
Space will kill you
In the not too distant future, South Korea’s KASC (whatever the hell that is) suffers a devastating set back when its first manned Moon mission and its Naraeho space craft blows up in its face. Five years later, they’re trying again, with a second gen craft, the Wooriho, and a new crew of three: Cho Yoon-jong (Lee Yi-kyung), Lee Sang-won (Kim Rae-won), and Navy SEAL (!) kid Hwang Sun-woo (Exo’s Doh Kyung-soo, Along with the Gods), whose dad (Lee Sung-min, The Spy Gone North) fell on his sword and took responsibility for the failure of the first mission. What d’ya know? A solar flare, or wind or something, messes with the second mission too, stranding Hwang the younger to orbit the moon all alone, facing one catastrophe after another. No, really. The moon really piles on.
In fairness, up to this point The Moon isn’t all that bad. There’s some good space work (those retractable solar panels are awesome) to go with the stellar production design, so it’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security. When the solar flare hits, everything falls apart, and I don’t mean on the Wooriho. The flight director (Park Byung-eun) is evidently stealth inept, because they get Kim Jae-guk (Sol Kyung-gu, Public Enemy, Oasis), Naraeho’s hot-headed boss (they’re always hot-headed) out of mothballs for a rescue. He’s dropped out since the earlier disaster and the elder Hwang’s suicide; they were friends. Kim comes up with some solutions but he needs help, and he turns to his ex-wife and – wait for it – NASA boss Moon-young (or Jennifer Evans, she lives in the States and married a white guy, c’mon). Like The Martian, there’s never really any sense that Sun-woo might not make it back, but unlike The Martian he’s such a fucking nob you don’t really care if he does.
The Moon falls down mostly because it decides to put hyper-emotionalism ahead of storytelling. This is a K-drama in space, replete with family connections, tears, dark, soul-crushing secrets, tears, professional rivalry, tears, sudden forgiveness, and tears. I’ve never worked for NASA but chances are no mission is going to continue on after it loses 66% of it crew – no matter how much an astronaut wants to “do it for my father, and my country.” Also, if Sun-woo’s a SEAL, why is he so rubbish at survival-ing? On the villain side (aside from murderous space) we have Korea’s minister of science and technology (Jo Han-chul) and his deputy minister (Choi Byung-mo), who are mostly concerned with optics, and what all the people gazing up at public monitors will think of them. Special shout-out to the hilariously sneering performance by Daniel C Kennedy (I think) as Moon-young’s super-suspicious nemesis at NASA. He spends most of his screen time sniping about security and “Weren’t you married to the last Naraeho flight director? I wonder how he got that information?” All he’s missing is a moustache to twirl.
Kim Yong-hwa managed to mould the confounding theology/mythology of Along with the Gods into an engaging and almost palpable adventure despite its fantastical roots, largely because he never forgot to have a sense of humour. Ditto for writer Drew Godard and Ridley Scott in The Martian. The Moon is such a dead serious melodrama, with all of a melodrama’s nonsense machinations, it feels less realistic than Gods – and every bit its two hours. Especially when everyone makes consistently stupid decisions no aeronautics and deep space pro ever would. And for the record, Sun-woo gets to crash land on the moon once. Not twice. Not three times. Once. Goddamn! — DEK