1969

Hard to believe that on this day forty years ago human beings, for the first time in all of recorded history, were on their way to the moon. July 16th, 1969, and the enormous Saturn V lifts from its pad, its gigantic bulk suddenly no longer earthbound, and it reaches into the sky... and then beyond the sky. Humans have made many great explorations of new lands, uncharted oceans, jungles, deserts, mountains, but this, this was something completely new. Less than a decade after Gagarin had become the first man in space (an event itself which came only a couple of decades after jets made their first appearance, those in turn coming only four decades after Orville and Wilbur's historic first flight at Kittyhawk) humans were travelling to the Moon.



Its hung over every human culture there has ever been, since the days of hunter-gatherers, its been observed by the early priest-astronomers of the first civilisations in what we now call the Middle East, worshipped as a goddess by many cultures, observed by the first modern scientists like Galileo and Copernicus, its affected our weather and our tides for billions of years. But the idea of men on the Moon was a dream, a work of fantasy. Until July 1969. When it became something truly remarkable. An event that for one brief spell drew together all the peoples of our divided world into one species, dreaming the same dream, hoping the same hopes, willing Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong to succeed in the daring, dangerous endeavour. A magnificent moment.







NASA's restored video of Neil Armstrong's 'giant leap' (link via Boing Boing)

"I'll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon"

"And if the dam breaks open many years too soon

And if there is no room upon the hill

And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too

I'll see you on the Dark Side Of The Moon" (Pink Floyd, Brain Damage)

I'm currently enjoying my annual smorgasbord of movies at the Edinburgh International Film Festival where among the movies from around the world is a low budget, independent British film by Duncan Jones (previously known as Zowie Bowie - yes, David's wee boy, but commendably he's deliberately not playing on that, he wants folks to come on the film's merits). Moon is a most unusual beast - it's a British low-budget, indy movie that isn't a social realism piece set in a housing estate. Not that I have any problems with those (some bloody good films come out of that field), but it often seems in the UK film industry today we either make small budgeted social realism dramas or larger budgeted (still small by US standards though) historical costume dramas for the most part. A low budget Brit indy science fiction film? Unusual. And one which uses story and intelligence in lieu of dazzling effects and big explosions? Remarkable.

I was lucky enough to bag tickets to the UK premiere of Moon at the Film Fest here - both scheduled screenings sold out very quickly (although it has been added to next Sunday's Best of the Fest, essentially a Second Chance Sunday for sold out flicks from the Festival, book now before they are gone). Right from the start I liked it. Sam Rockwell (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Frost/Nixon) takes on a pretty tough role as he is mostly the only actor in the main scenes, apart from a few small spots (mostly video 'letters'), a technician manning a mining station on the far side of the moon on a three year stretch, his only company a computer called Gerty, voiced by Kevin Spacey (and with a screen showing emoticons as a 'face').

As the film opens there's a bit of a Dark Star vibe to the look and feel of it; like Dark Star, or the later Nostromo in Alien, this isn't the gleaming future of mighty starships like Star Trek, this is space as workplace. Its grimy, its worn, its dirty in places. Rockwell's Sam Bell at the start is a shaggy haired, straggly beared man talking to himself and his sickly looking plants or obsessively carving out his model of his small town home as he works alone on the Moon. The end of his three year tour of duty is approaching and Sam is counting the days until he can go home to his wife and little daughter. Rockwell does an admirable job of creating a convincing portrayal of a man who has been as isolated as it is about as possible for any human to be (even the live communication link has been lost due to solar flares, he can only receive and send recorded messages via a relay, no real time communication). His twitches and habits are believable of a man in that situation and the emotional desperation as he watches a video letter from his wife with their wee girl on her lap saying "daddy is an astronaut" is incredibly touching, you can feel his desire to be with his family coming out of the screen, but Rockwell wisely plays it subtly, restrained, not over the top or hystrionic, which enhances the emotional resonance, I thought.

There are little hints that the constant isolation and lack of even real time communications are taking their psychological toll on Sam. Watching a video from his wife it looks as if there was a sudden blip - did something change there or his strained mind just imagining things? Making a cuppa he turns around to see a young, teenage girl sitting in his chair, accidentally scalding himself in shock. He looks again and of course there is no-one there, how could there be? His sleep and dreams are equally disturbed. Returning to work he takes a lunar rover out onto the Moon's surface and approaches one of the huge, automated mining machines, making its way across the surface on its tracks, spewing out chunks of regolith from the back as it moves. When an accident occurs and the rover crashes into the mining machine, Sam blacks out, only to wake up in the base's medical bay with a concerned Gerty tending to him. How exactly did he return to the base, considering there was no-one else around to rescue him from his crashed rover? Confined to the base 'for his own safety' until he is recovered Sam suspects there is more going on than he's been told and engineers a method to get outside and investigate. What he finds will shake him to the core - assuming its real and not the product of a mind collapsing under years of isolation syndrome.

And on the plot I shall say no more because to do otherwise would mean revealing potential spoilers, which I'd rather not do (I will also warn you that a BBC article on the film here, while interesting, does, in my opinion, blow a major plot point, which is damned careless, so be warned if you follow that link). On the production side, as I noted Rockwell does extremely well with a challenging role, the feeling of desperation and tension are palpable and the effects have a suitably dirty, grungy look to them. I had the impression that the exteriors were model shots - not because they were poor, I hasten to add, but they had that lovely physical feel that CGI sometimes just can't manage (especially for dirtier, grittier looks such as the mining machines), reminding me (pleasantly) of the brilliant Moon models used for the likes of Space 1999. Director Jones and several of his crew were present at the screening and confirmed that they did indeed use physical models for those effects - in fact the same effects man who created the Nostromo worked on their models, which, as I said, looked perfect in the context of the film (and added to the physicality of the film in my opinion).

(director Duncan Jones talking to the audience in the Cameo Cinema after Moon's UK premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Saturday, larger version on my Flickr)

When asked about the budget (around £2.5 million - yes, really) Jones said that doing an SF flick for that money wasn't too hard, but convincing the financiers that they could make this movie within that budget was much more difficult, they all assumed they would need a much bigger budget to achieve what they were planning (we should have asked for more money, quipped the producer). But through ingenuity they made it work - as their visual effects/designer guy pointed out its amazing the sets you can make with duct tape, paint and a bunch of Ikea flat pack furniture items (not that you can tell, it all looked very convincing). Jones told the packed (and very supportive) Edinburgh audience that they loved the SF genre and they wanted to veer away from effects-reliant 'tentpole' blockbusters and make 'smart SF'. I'd say they've done so. Its a hugely admirable effort (especially for his first feature), Rockwell is convincing as the central character Sam, the look and feel of the film is suitably grimy, its quite a while before we can really tell if Sam is cracking up and hallucinating it all or if something sinister really is going on and from the look of it you'd never believe it was made for such a small budget.

Its British, its Indy and its bloody good science fiction. Moon gets its general release in the UK on the 17th of July (appropriately close to the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing) and is well deserving of your attention and support. I'm guessing with that sort of budget they won't have a mighty studio marketing machine, so if you like it, spread the word and give the guys some much deserved support for creating some bloody good Brit movie SF.

new moon over Royal Mile

new moon over Royal Mile
Originally uploaded by byronv2

New moon and Venus rising over the tall, old tenements of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh's Old Town on the way home from work a few days ago.

New moon



Just after sunset a pale new moon hangs in the sky over the Victorian tenements of Edinburgh



The same section of canal as the earlier canoe photos, only a couple of hours later on (click for the bigger versions on Flickr)

Hunting werewolves

Full moon this weekend, good werewolf hunting weather (hey, everyone needs a hobby and it gives me some exercise and gets me out into the fresh air):



(all this scene needs now is Christopher Lee in his Dracula cape; click for the bigger version on my Flickr)



(the full moon reflecting on the Union Canal; fun to compare this to summer evening pic of this same location I took a while back on my Flickr)

No lycanthropes were harmed in the making of these photographs, although my fingers got sodding frozen.

The moon and the sun

It's that time of year when you can look up on a bright, autumnal morning and see the sun in on direction, rising from the sea and look the other way and see the moon hanging in a clear, pale blue sky at the same time. Somehow seeing the moon in daylight always make me think on a scene from the old 70s show Space 1999...

Saturn

JPL and the ESA have announced that the Cassini probe has found a small, previously unknown moon around the giant world Saturn the sixtieth so far discovered around the ringed world. It may be a tiny lump of rock and ice but I love the fact that almost 50 years after Gagarin's first space flight our own solar system is still surprising us. Makes me wonder what we will discover when we finally get further out (and why haven't we pushed further, we let ourselves get so small after the Apollo missions...)



Elsewhere on the ESA site there's a function to listen to the Huygens probe which descended into the large moon Titan from Cassini. The sound files aren't especially interesting as such, in fact is is just a rather dull sequence of white noise, but the fact the first one is a recording of sounds heard on an alien world is. Sounds from a world no human has walked on, beamed across millions of miles to be heard for the first time in human history. Now that is impressive.