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We recently watched the new "thoughtful" sci fi movie Moon. It's a good movie for those of us who enjoy a nice, serious sci-fi movie now and then. It's also good for one of my favorite activities - comparing things! This is a long post, so to road map a little, the first part is going to have some detail comparisons, then we'll look at villain tropes in sci fi movies, and then finish with a really strong conclusion that ties it all together! This is going to be very rewarding for the strong few who make it to the end!

2001 was such an obvious dead father that the movie can hardly stand on its own. I once heard a Flickr theorist say (correctly I think) that images on a Flickr stream do not exist on their own but instead only make sense as part of a photo narrative. Same goes for this movie - it really doesn't make sense outside of a certain history. Let's look at a few obvious comparisons.

I liked the dirtification and messification of the living quarters. It was not only a nice humanizing touch but a larger comment on how the idea of "Future" has changed - it's no longer a sparkling clean perfect world but a rickety and messy world. This has obviously been dealt with in other movies, but here the forced comparison with 2001 was really effective.

I really liked the harvesters. Those wide shots of the bovine harvesters with their slo-mo cloud of dust were my favorite shots in the whole movie. I guess this isn't a comparison.

I did not like GERTY. GERTY is like opposite-HAL. The terrifying red eye has been replaced by a silly emoticon face. He's easily cowed, emotionally vulnerable, and so pathetic that he's got a "kick me" sign on his back. What a putz. (And he's not even a funny putz. Let's face it, he's no Bender.  Futurama in general has great robots. I particularly love Hedonismbot and Tinny Tim.)

While I enjoy comparing details, themes can also be compared! While the 2001 villain is "technology zomg," the Moon villain is "corporations zomg." Both are on the short list of popular sci-fi enemies:

• the government (also empire, totalitarian leader, or shady ruling cabal)
• the other (aliens, mutants, monsters, demons)
• technology
• corporations
• ourselves! (preferrably said with an anguished cry)

Clearly technology and the government are on the out. Corporations are on the rise. Aliens never go out of style.

We can see the trend just by looking at TV shows. My beloved X-Files with its government/alien conspiracy has given way to watered down corporate villain fare like Dollhouse and Fringe. My precious Lost has many villains, but the DHARMA Initiative is the evilest and shadowiest one.

Even the nerds at shameless fanboi site io9 (which I never visit) overwhelmingly agree: corporate control is the name of the game. They've even got a handy list of 15 evil sci fi corporations. So even though the corporate villain is nothing new (Lex Luthor first appeared in Superman in 1940), the rise of the corporation as villain in recent years is interesting because of some larger truth about anxiety related to globalized late capitalism blah blah blah.

But we already knew this. So we can understand Moon as offering an update to generic sci-fi tropes, of taking the pulse of sci fi trends and coming up corporate. If 2001 is iconic because it so perfectly captures everything amazing about 1960s futurism, then Moon might be iconic because it captures something about 2000s futurism. It's a dingy futurism where technology is more bumbling than scary and where biotech and corporate abuse are the real sources of anxiety.

Considering the hoopla around the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, Moon's only interesting update might be to the idea of American attitudes toward space exploration. In 2001, space exploration is dangerous (the dreaded technology zomg!) yet offers total reinvention of humanity as a prize. In Moon, space exploration is only useful to fuel life back home. Easy travel to the moon is so uncompelling in this future that they can only get one dude to stay up there. For all the space program nostalgia that's going around, this is one update to the sci fi trope trove that seems interesting and original.

And at the end of this bumbling review which I will now consider "New Yorker-esque," I leave you with another video. This one is so meta it'll blow. Your. Mind. And if your strong suit is video game/music/youtube cognition, these two videos will basically sum everything up.