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spacetime coordinates: 2000-2010’s Liberty City, Miami
Moonlight is a 2016 American coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Barry Jenkins, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s unpublished semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It stars Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris, and Mahershala Ali.
The Time Machine is a 2002 American science fiction film loosely adapted from the 1895 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells and the screenplay of the 1960 film of the same name by David Duncan. Arnold Leibovit served as executive producer and Simon Wells served as director, the great-grandson of the original author. The film stars Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy, Sienna Guillory and Phyllida Law, and includes a cameo by Alan Young, who also appeared in the 1960 film adaptation. The film is set in New York City instead of London, and contains new story elements not present in the original novel, including a romantic backstory, a new scenario about how civilization was destroyed, and several new characters, such as an artificially intelligent hologram played by Orlando Jones, and a Morlock leader played by Jeremy Irons. The film’s recreation of New York at the turn of the century won it some praise.
Many of the time traveling scenes were entirely computer generated, including a 33-second shot in the workshop where the time machine is located. The camera pulls out, traveling through New York City and then into space, past the ISS, and ends with a space plane landing at the moon to reveal earth’s future lunar colonies. Plants and buildings are shown springing up and then being replaced by new growth in a constant cycle. In later shots, the effects team used an erosion algorithm to digitally simulate the Earth’s landscape changing through the centuries.
Moon is a 2009 British science fiction drama film co-written and directed by Duncan Jones. The film follows Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the Moon. It was the feature debut of director Duncan Jones. Kevin Spacey voices Sam’s robot companion, GERTY.
Jones described the intent: “[We] wanted to create something which felt comfortable within that canon of those science fiction films from the sort of late seventies to early eighties.” The director spoke of his interest in the lunar setting: “for me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it…. There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don’t know that much about it.”
The director described the lack of romance in the Moon as a location, citing images from the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE: “It’s the desolation and emptiness of it…it looks like some strange ball of clay in blackness…. Look at photos and you’ll think that they’re monochrome. In fact, they’re not. There simply are no primary colours.” Jones made reference to the photography book Full Moon by Michael Light in designing the look of the film.
Jones is planning a follow-up film, titled Mute, which will serve as an epilogue to Moon. “Sam has agreed to do a little cameo in the next film”, said Jones, who ultimately hopes to complete a trilogy of films set in the same fictional universe.
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