I’ve seen quite a few Chinese Science Fiction films lately, but most of them left me rather unsatisfied.
So it seems a bit of a shock to find a beautiful, comedy about a man who is stranded on the moon and forced to find some way to survive there.
Now, I’ll admit that most of those less than satisfactory films were apparently made for the iQIYI video platform, but most of them shared the same basic flaw: they looked great, they had solid casts, and interesting science fictional ideas.
But they just didn’t do enough with all that.
But you can’t say that about Moon Man.
In the not-too-distant future, a monster asteroid is hurtling towards the Earth, and the only way to stop it is to blow it up and use the Moon to absorb the shrapnel.
However, something goes wrong. The missile hits the asteroid in the wrong spot, and most of the debris heads straight at the project’s moonbase headquarters.
The base is evacuated, but, Yue (Teng Shen), one of the maintenance crew, fails to hear the alarms and gets left behind all by himself.
And moments later, a big piece of the asteroid falls to Earth, flooding vast parts of the world and filling the skies vast clouds of dust, driving the few survivors underground.
Yue is left with more than enough food to keep him alive for years, but no hope of rescue. He doesn’t realize that anyone survived the disaster, and Mission Control on Earth can’t contact him.
However, they can see everything he does as the video cameras are still broadcasting. The project’s Director realizes that, by showing everyone that Yue is still alive, they can bring just a little hope to the world by televising Yue’s life on the Moon.
However, it doesn’t work out the way they expected as Yue finds that there is another survivor there with him: a red Kangaroo called “King Kong Roo”…
Okay, try to imagine a playful, comic version of The Martian. With a Kangaroo. And a hero “snowboarding” on the Moon. Who just happens to be a Truman Show style hero bringing hope to the world.
And who just happens to be hopelessly in love with one of his fellow Astronauts who barely knows that he’s alive.
The main reason this all works is Teng Shen, who gives us a character who is by turns a goofy loser, a weird oddball, a bumbler — and yet at the same time inventive, surprisingly talented at constructing and using his wacky inventions, and capable of finding some eccentric solution no matter how bad things look.
And yet we also see him get broken down and nearly give up hope.
He does this effortlessly, and you have to give them credit for how his appearance changes throughout the film, from the naive young man who tries to be as average as possible and takes a job far below his abilities so he can follow his heart, to his increasingly unkempt state towards the middle of the film. He looks older by the end of the film, as well. It must have been a challenge for the makeup and costume crews to keep track of these changes and make sure he looked right in every scene.
After all, very few movies are shot in order.
I’m not sure how it would look on the big screen, but on my big LED screen it is spectacular. Not only do we get dazzling space shots, but the footage of the moon’s surface is solid and convincing, with Yue interacting (often painfully) with cliffs and craters. The vehicles look a lot like designs we’ve been seeing both in use and in the pages of Popular Science. The rockets might best be described as a cross between Elon Musk’s Space X boosters, and some of the chunky, multi-engined Russian craft.
I’m not entirely sure how realistic it all is, but it looks like it would work, which is what matters.
And as wacky as it all gets, none of it is ever quite as absurd as that drop top rocket Matt Damon rides off of Mars.
The animated titles add a lot to the film, thanks to their bold colors and simplified, toy-like design. They even get reprised at the end.
Now I will note that the end does linger a bit, and that some of you might not be ready for the ending. I appreciate it, and think it is a fitting end, even if part of me would have liked something more Hollywood.
What is remarkable here, for a film which has so many callbacks to other films we love, this is something new and unique, a film which is at once a brilliant slapstick comedy, a hopeful post-Apocalyptic tale, a story of courage, resourcefulness and determination, and a tender and often touching love story.
It’s the sort of film which makes us accept the notion of a kangaroo in a spacesuit.
I hope Moon Man gets released here in the U.S. I hope it gets lots of play and thousands or even millions of people watch this film here in the United States.
But more than anything else, I hope that Moon Man will grab our studio executives by the neck and shake them. I hope that it asks them, “why in the world aren’t you making films like this?”
We used to. Not that long ago, either. We used to be able to take great actors and put them in lovingly absurd stories and create movies which we not only loved but remembered.
Remember that time? Back before eighty percent of our new movies were sequels?
And you know, it might just inspire them to do better.
After all, if all you make are copies, pretty soon there won’t be anything left to copy…
rivets on the poster 
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