The best film of the year that you didn’t hear about (and should have) is Duncan Jones’ sci-fi flick Moon.

There were better films released in 2009 than Moon, but most of those were obscure foreign films that you weren’t going to see anyway, even if every reputable critic in America wrote you a personal letter explaining why you should see it. Those films probably had war-torn orphans, three hour running times, and deep things to say about the ethereal nature of the human soul. So let’s simplify things and pretend those other movies really don’t count for this award. (Really, they don’t. I didn’t see any pretentious three hour foreign films that were any better than Moon, anyway. And since this is my blog, we go by my rules. If you want to nominate something else, feel free to list it in the comments.)

Moon is a tidy little package, clocking in at what feels like a brief 100 minutes. It’s a simple story, free of pretentions, and yet it has plenty to say about the ethereal nature of the soul.

The story is simple. Sam (excellently played by Sam Rockwell) is working alone on the far side of the moon. He’s in the tail end of a three year gig, operating a mining facility. He’s alone except for GERTY, the wise and omnipresent robot who controls the facility. Then he has an accident and he’s rescued by… himself.

Each man believes the other to be the clone, and the argument over who is who -and more importantly, who gets to go home at the end of the tour – unfolds in ways both straightforward and surprising.

Steeped in the production design of classic science fiction movies of the 1970′s, the film deliberately evokes 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, and Alien. What’s delightful about Moon is that every time it teeters on the edge of becoming a predictable genre flick, it gently curves into new and surprising territory. The biggest spoiler for the film is not the identity of Sam’s rescuer, but the knowledge that it’s not a slasher flick, nor a predictable horror flick. The second half of the film is coyly suspenseful, building tension with strong, concise storytelling. There are no aliens leaping out of the dark. The omnipresent robot (slyly voiced by Kevin Spacey) doesn’t turn out to be malignant technology run amok. There’s no labored twists, just smooth storytelling. And every time you have the story figured out, writer/director Duncan Jones finds a nuance that keeps you thinking and a left turn to keep you engaged.

Sam Rockwell handles the dual role with a deceptive ease, and since he’s the only person onscreen for 97% of the film, it’s easy to overlook what a nuanced performance he gives. He’s always had a slacker’s ease on screen, acting as if he was a half-second behind the rest of the world. Watching him embody that age-old dilemma of “What would happen if I met myself at a party? What if I thought I was an asshole?”, that slight delay speaks volumes. Watching Sam try to figure himself out is some of the most effective on-screen philosophizing as you’ll find this year.

The effects work is satisfyingly tactile. Shot for about the same budget as The Hurt Locker, Moon unfolds in a world every bit as tactile. Unlike the tiresomely digital cartoons of Avatar, the questions about human nature have an immediacy to them and a quiet depth that will have you thinking about them long after the story has unfolded. In space, sometimes a contemplative whisper is more effective than a scream.

Moon is now available on DVD and via Netflix. Go put it in your queue. You’ll be glad you did.

Maybe if Cameron used a blue crayon, it would be more original.

(EDIT – Weds 1/6: My original rant on Avatar is here. And I wish I could link this pic directly to the creator, instead of this graphic via HuffPo. Still, to whomever Matt Bateman is, kudos!)

The Hurt Locker.

One of the few movies of 2009 to deserve every ounce of the praise that’s piled on it, Kathyn Bigelow’s story of a EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) unit in Baghdad is relentless from the very first frames and barely rests until the final fade out. It scores the best picture of 2009 award because it does two things to perfection. First, it is wall-to-wall with old-school Hollywood suspense. There’s no digital armies of zombies, or ridiculous CGI acrobatics with military hardware and indestructible super-soldiers. The whole film is wired like a bomb that could explode at any second.

Second, all that suspense is wrapped around the first truly great cinematic rendering of the Iraq war. Every other Iraq war movie to date has been a ponderous melodrama. The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, and Stop-Loss were all misfires. Errol Morris’ probing documentary of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Standard Operating Procedure, got lost in the fog of war. The worst of the bunch is Paul Haggis’ In The Valley Of Elah – a film so smugly awful that words barely can describe the levels of failure in operation.

The Hurt Locker succeeds where everything else to date has failed because it refuses to explain itself. It doesn’t scold, nag, or pontificate. The decorated grunts in the EOD don’t know who they’re fighting. They don’t know what they’re fighting for. All they know is that being alive at the end of the day is victory, and nothing else matters. It works because Bigelow and her production team have created a cinematic world where everything is mundane and hostile at the same time. Shot in Jordan under war-like conditions, the heat and the tension suffuse every frame of the film. You never find out if the bystanders are curious onlookers trying to upload videos to YouTube or insurgents ready to detonate a bomb.

This is the clearest narrative picture audiences have gotten of the Iraq war, and by the time the credits roll, The Hurt Locker should make you angry. Why are we involved in this mess? This isn’t a fight for ground or for principles. It’s a war without a finish line. If our soldiers survive the day, it’s a small victory and there’s no other metric to measure progress. The intense storytelling and the immersive detail transform the nihilistic core of the Iraq war into a palpable knot in your stomach. If the soldiers doing the dirty work don’t know why they’re there, does anybody?

Bigelow is the first filmmaker to not only grasp the futility of the Iraq war, she’s the first director to transform that unknowability into a truly gripping narrative. By embracing the chaos, she gives us the first authentic narrative voice to the Iraq war. The best Vietnam movies all revolved around that same grim knowledge, that fighting in an unknowable war is an absurd experience. Putting a shiny badge of “war is bad” on a simple melodrama is an insult to the nearly incomprehensible post-modern conflict our political leaders pointlessly rushed us into.

Unlike her ex-husband James Cameron’s current exercise in directorial dick-swinging (the bland Avatar), The Hurt Locker doesn’t waste a frame. The tech credits are superb – the documentary style camerwork, the immersive sound design, the flawless editing – every production department is firing on all cylinders. The whole film is one of cinema’s primal elements – suspense – stripped down to its purest form.

Perhaps the most telling thing about The Hurt Locker is that the most memorable image isn’t of the war, it’s the generic cereal aisle of a generic grocery store. After surviving the heat and the explosive madness of Baghdad, the leader of the EOD unit finds himself stumped by a wall of cartoon cereal boxes. It’s a simple image – one that Oliver Stone (among others) has tried and failed to convey several times – but here it resonates. For months after seeing it, every time I’m in a grocery store, deep in the heart of civilization, surrounded by climate controlled rows of plentiful food, I can’t help but think about all the soldiers and civilians fighting and dying for reasons that won’t be clear even a hundred years from now. We’re on the same planet, but it might as well be another world.

I’ve been chewing it over for the better part of a week (or at least attempting to chew it over – a movie this digitally amplified is so vaporous as to almost refuse mastication), and I’m tempted to upgrade my reflections to ‘fucking ridiculous’. I hold back on the profantiy-enhanced judgement largely because Avatar isn’t solid enough to bear the insult. To label this trifle ‘fucking ridiculous’ would be an insult to the films that are truly fucking ridiculous.

Normally a movie this slender wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except that the specific gravity inherent in a $300 million USD price tag and the megalomaniacal boasts of its creator that it will change cinema forever warrant an appropriately slight response. So ridiculous it is.

First, hasn’t anybody else choked on the irony that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to deploy state of the art computer technology to tell the story of a bunch of barefoot people running around in mud worshipping a tree?

I find this myth of the ‘noble savage’ to be odious. Count me in the Fox News camp on this point, but people who need to exalt the touchy-feely-one-with-mother-earth-equates-to-moral-superiority ethos have some deeply unresolved issues of personal guilt that need to be worked out, preferably in a therapists office lit with electric lights, heated by piped-in natural gas, on a comfortable sofa free of twigs, and roofed with a sturdy, rain-repellent, mass-produced shingles.

Mr. Cameron, if you find life enhanced by modern trappings such as metal alloys, supercomputers, and meals that don’t need to be chased for miles to be spiritually unfulfilling, perhaps you might eschew their conveniences in your next production.

You find me a village of tree-dwelling people living without shoes who would scorn grocery stores, the conveniences of mass production, and indoor plumbing and I’ll change my tune. My money, however, says that the majority of the developing world would be absolutely ecstatic to wake up tomorrow and find that everything around them resembles suburban New Jersey.

All things require balance, and if you can’t find spiritual satisfaction in the material world around you, the answer isn’t to take the stuff away. As the first Rabbi says in A Serious Man: “Look at the parking lot. Just look at that parking lot!” Sure, it’s goofy, but it is well-intentioned, and a much better answer than Avatar‘s position of “Damn you to hell, evil soulless gods of corporate technology, mother Pandora’s magic tree will take care of me!”

As a side-note for the nature-lovers out there, please note that nature is pretty much the exact opposite of the tender, nurturing earth mother myth. The wild is a cold, brutal place where life truly is kill-or-be-killed, where a sprained ankle means you’ve just become dinner for the next step of the food chain. Every religion has it’s dark side, but only the worst breeds of religious fundamentalism have downsides as brutal as mother nature’s. Please remember that the next time you sing fairy songs while airbrushing moons and wolves onto your formal t-shirt collection.

As for Avatar‘s raison d’etre is the 3D, and it’s lovely as 3D goes, but it’s just a gimmick. Take away the techno-fetishism and you have a leaden lump of a story left behind. It’s Dances With Wolves meets Giant Smurfs. Without Photoshop and a hundred million or so for ‘botanical design artists’, you have a story about as compelling as Disney’s Pocahontas, which is great if you’re a ten year old girl.The effects are groundbreaking, perhaps, but the term ‘groundbreaking’ for digital cinema has lost all perspective. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were groundbreaking. Bullet-time from The Matrix was truly eye-popping. But both of those effects were grounded in real, practical locations. Even the stellar effects work in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was a staggering mix of practical camera tricks, oversized props, and carefully deployed digital work.

Avatar falls into the same trap that Lucas’ execrable modern Star Wars trilogy bungled into – when everything on-screen is created digitally, nothing is special anymore. Audiences can feel the work that goes into creating an image, and real imagery will always generate more emotional power than an army of typists inserting physically implausible waterfalls in places they don’t belong. A decade from now, the sweeping landscape panoramas of New Zealand in Lord Of The Rings will humiliate any of the epic vistas in Avatar. Projected on a big screen today, the epic landscapes from Lawrence Of Arabia or even Raiders Of The Lost Ark, will generate more awe than the meticulously rendered forests of Avatar.Simply put, most of the sweeping visuals in Avatar wouldn’t look out of place if they were airbrushed onto the side of a blue 1976 Ford van. The poster for Avatar should have a sticker that says “if this van is a-rocking, don’t come a-knocking” stuck on it. And by the time Avatar 2: Pasty-Faced Bureaucrat’s Revenge comes out, the Pandoran landscapes will look irredeemably dated.

Cameron’s Titanic was enhanced by the megalithic scale. A story about one of the biggest technological follies of the 20th century, that required even larger doses of hubris to produce worked hand-in-hand with each other. The story and the meta-story fused into a moebius strip of ambition, and the result worked spectacularly well, despite the embarrassing horrid dialogue that made everybody but ten year old girls cringe. It’s a film that needed to spend $200 million USD simply to be the film that spent $200 million USD. On a $50 million budget, Titanic simply wouldn’t have worked, even if you were a ten year old girl.

Two years from now, when you flip past Avatar on FX, it’ll be little more than a novelty. If you catch Terminator, T2, or even True Lies while channel surfing, they’re all worth at least a half-hour of your time. Stumble across Avatar, and at best you’ll look at the blue-tinted weightless digitalia, and shrug while you vaguely remember “oh yeah, that was OK.” Then you’ll surf on to something far more real and tangible, like season 7 of The Kardashians.