Director/Screenplay – Kim Yong-hwa, Producers – Kim Yong-hwa & Seo Ho-jin, Photography – Kim Young-ho, Music – Lee Jae-hak, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jin Jong-hyun. Production Company – CJ ENM Studios/Blaad Studios.
Sol Kyung-gu (Kim Jae-guk), Do Kyung-soo (Hwang Sun-woo), Jo Han-chul (Minister), Park Byung-eun (Jeong Min-gyu), Hong Seung-hee (Han-byeol), Kim Hee-ae (Yoon Moon-young), Kim Rae-won (Lee Sang-won), Lee Yi-kyung (Cho Yoon-jong)
Five years ago, the Korean space agency attempted to launch the Narae-ho, a manned rocket to land on The Moon. However, this proved to be a failure when the rocket exploded shortly after launch, killing the three astronauts aboard. Now, in the year 2029, the Koreans have withdrawn from the international Space Commission and are trying to launch another Moon mission, the Woori-ho. This is successfully launched but part way to the Moon the Woori-ho is struck by a severe solar storm. The two senior astronauts go outside to conduct repairs but are caught by an explosion, which blows one off his tether and pierces the suit of the other, killing both. This only leaves Hwang Sun-woo, the rookie among the crew. The Korean space minister demands that the designer of the ship be brought in. This is Kim Jae-guk, designer of the Narae-ho, who refuses to return until he learns that Sun-woo is the son of his co-designer who committed suicide in shame at the failure of the first expedition. Jae-guk comes in and directs Sun-woo what to do. Against his advice, Sun-woo insists on going on to complete the mission and land on the Moon. However, doing so is filled with a series of disasters that destroy the ship and strand Sun-woo on the dark side of the Moon.
A decade before The Moon came out, Gravity (2013) produced a revolution in the depiction of space on film with its story of Sandra Bullock as a lone astronaut stranded in orbit, showing her efforts to affect a rescue. Although we had seen realistic space films before, we had never seen anything that was portrayed with scrupulous scientific realism and gave us such a remarkable sense of actually being in space. This was followed by The Martian (2015) with Matt Damon stranded on Mars and similar scrupulously scientific realistic attempts made to rescue him.
Other works followed these successes with the likes of Approaching the Unknown (2016), Life (2017), The Space Between Us (2017), Ad Astra (2019), The Midnight Sky (2020) and I.S.S. (2023), and on tv screens The Expanse (tv series, 2015-22), The First (2018), Away (2020) and the National Geographic channel docudrama series Mars (2016-8), as well as the real-life based films such as Salyut 7 (2017) and First Man (2018). (For a more detailed overview see my essay Films About NASA and the Space Program).
The Moon was the eighth film for South Korean director Kim Yong-hwa. Kim had made a string of commercial successes with the non-genre likes of Oh! Brothers (2003), 200 Pound Beauty (2006), Take Off (2009) and Mr Go (2013). He previously had the massive hit of the afterlife film Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds (2017) and its sequel Along With the Gods: The Last 49 Days (2018), as well as wrote the horror film Escape: Project Silence (2023).
The Moon feels very much influenced by Gravity and The Martian. There is an amalgam of the essential plots that drive either film – the astronaut stranded in orbit and trying to deal with a series of progressive catastrophes that we have in Gravity; and the bring the stranded astronaut back home plot of The Martian. Although, in this latter regard, with the constant switching between the astronaut in orbit trying to deal with ongoing issues and the scrabble for technical solutions back in Ground Control, what The Moon resembles far more than either of these is Apollo 13 (1995).
The plot is constructed with a tight tension that is constantly providing complications that up the game on the protagonists. It is a film that is often construed around a series of dramatic peaks – the landing on The Moon; the capsule becoming trapped in a crater and Do Kyung-soo having to make an escape with the use of a drone; his having to run the obstacle course of a meteor shower; the rendezvous with the orbiter that goes wrong leaving Do Kyung-soo trapped on the dark side of the Moon; and then the ingenious means whereby he makes his escape from there. It makes for some gripping drama. It all comes with very good effects, even if they are not quite up in the stratosphere of Gravity.
The one thing The Moon does have that Gravity and The Martian do not is a good deal of nationalistic pride where we get the sense of a mission team constantly trying to do things for the honour of the Korean nation. In between that, the film plays all the emotional cues it can – from the death of characters to the astronaut hoping to name his daughter on The Moon to the final scene of the film.
Trailer here