David Mitchell once did a comedy sketch about a lazy writer, proud of his latest hospital drama for not getting ‘bogged down’ by the jargon of healthcare. It nonetheless leaned relentlessly on the word medicine and if a scene was, particularly life or death, ‘really strong medicine.’
It came to mind while watching The Moon. There are long stretches where the thrilling grit of space travel faces off against obscure nob twiddling in a flight center, replicating the fetishistic techno-jargon of Steamboy, where men at dials shout over their shoulders about their jobs. Unfortunately for the drama here, the lengthy sequences in the flight center, with its dozens of technocrats and whiz-bang graphics, amount to little more than tinsel. You could lift half an hour of this film out, stand it on its own, and call it Thirty Men Rebooting a Computer.

“A newly discovered wealth of Helium 3 has sparked a modern-day ‘great game’ for the Moon, and South Korea has committed to joining it…”
That aside, things are mostly golden. Writer-director Yong-Hwa Kim’s story opens with a pacy and very convincing newsreel montage depicting the near future. A newly discovered wealth of Helium 3 has sparked a modern-day ‘great game’ for the Moon, and South Korea has committed to joining it, rushing to man a landing. However, the first craft, named Narae-ho, explodes just after taking off, killing the crew and causing the technical lead, Hwang Gyu-Tae, to take his life in shame.
We then move forward five years. A fresh mission (Woori-ho) was launched successfully, only to be damaged in a solar storm en route to the Moon. To rescue the craft, the Korean Aeronautics and Space Centre (KASC) tracks down the former flight director of Narae-ho, Kim Jae-guk (Sol Kyung-gu), who refuses to get involved until learning the son of his departed colleague Gyu-Tae is aboard. Jae-guk reluctantly returns to work, hoping to save the young astronaut. The story from hereon in plays very well with this thread, hinting that there is something in Jae-guk’s past at the agency that badly needs reckoning with.
The script balances personal stakes with some pretty great extra-terrestrial action. The sequences in space are handled beautifully. The craft and the moon look convincing, and the lunar adventures have the look of hard science and the pulpy energy of Die Hard.