the moon movie review 2023

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The Moon Reviews

The Moon eventually loses its good favor and begins to feel like a hodgepodge of dangerous scenarios that a collection of studio executives forced into the final product, never coming up for air...

Full Review | Jul 5, 2024

The Moon is a solid action adventure drama, a mixed genre film that has a whole lot going and a whole lot going for it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 12, 2024

Once “The Moon” grabs your attention, it doesn’t let go. Similar to another crisis-in-space movie, “Gravity” (2013), it offers thrilling visuals with engaging human drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 1, 2024

This is a nicely realized slice of science fiction and a terrific piece of world cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 29, 2024

The Wrong Stuff

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 16, 2024

By turns illogical, infuriating, casually xenophobic and head-bangingly stupid, The Moon is one of the worst Korean blockbusters in recent memory.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 27, 2023

This film undeniably draws inspiration from movies like 'Gravity,' 'Apollo 13,' and 'Interstellar,' but ultimately succeeds in maintaining its own unique flavour.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 22, 2023

Is it good? Not really. But the excitement and explosions still manage to deliver.

Full Review | Aug 31, 2023

The Moon is one of the cinematic highlights of 2023. This is the film that many expected 2013’s Gravity to be. Not only is this one of the best films of this year it is an absolute masterpiece in the disaster movie genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 27, 2023

Lest one believe that only Hollywood can churn out a respectably mediocre piece of blockbuster entertainment, here is The Moon, a Korean import.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2023

The Moon's action set pieces are over-the-top ridiculous for a space movie, and seems keen to throw the protagonist into one perilous situation after the next without allowing audiences to feel any sense of jeopardy.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 22, 2023

"The Moon" is a movie that the sum of its individual elements does not exactly have a positive sign, but there are still enough elements here to deem the title entertaining, in a production that is bound to satisfy fans of Hollywood blockbusters.

Full Review | Original Score: 5 | Aug 20, 2023

You can easily pick out the movie’s numerous debts to Gravity and The Martian, and the movie’s setting in South Korea doesn’t inspire any creative touches in this well-worn territory.

Full Review | Aug 18, 2023

Even when we touch down on the moon, which is where there are actual moments of awe, the film keeps cutting back to the far less interesting goings-on taking place back on Earth. We are never swept up in the story, making each escalation land with a thud.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Aug 18, 2023

Director Kim makes good use of the combination of vast scale and claustrophobia, fame and isolation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2023

The movie might have been generally fun, except for how seriously it takes itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 17, 2023

A decent visual showcase of a space survival drama but can’t overcome its bloated storyline.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 10, 2023

Strong beats of suspense and action are wasted in a story awash in sentiment and K-drama cliches.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 3, 2023

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> The Moon (2023) Film Review

Reviewed by: Jennie Kermode

As I write this review, a Russian craft is on its way to the Moon, hoping to land at its south pole and search for ice. Only Russia, China and the US have ever successfully brought back samples from the Moon, and only the latter has ever landed people there. After a slow period, interest in doing so is growing once again because of the possibility pf mining helium-3, which exists in large quantities close to the surface, for use as a high yield, low pollution fuel here on Earth. The latest work from Kim Yong-hwa posits a situation in which South Korea has joined the race to land an astronaut who can bring back samples with a view to establishing a future mining operation.

As the story begins, the second such South Korean mission is about to set off, following the explosion of the first rocket several years earlier. On board are the highly trained Cho Yoon-jong and Lee San-won, along with relative newcomer Hwang Sun-woo (Do Kyung-soo), who happens to the son of one of the engineers involved in designing that first rocket, a man who killed himself following the disaster. Their spacecraft, Woori-ho, is nearing its target when high solar winds caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun knocks out communications. It also damages their solar panels, and Cho and Lee, spacewalking to repair them, are caught in an explosion. By the time the control centre is able to get back in touch, only Hwang remains alive, trapped in a damaged vessel which he cannot steer and which only has enough air left for five days.

The rest of the film follows efforts to rescue the imperilled astronaut, as one thing after another goes wrong. Spearheading effort is the space programme’s surviving engineer, Kim Jae-gook (Sol Kyung-gu), whose coping response after the disaster was to move away to a remote mountain. His ex-wife (Kim Hee-ae) happens to work for NASA and is gradually persuaded to help in small ways, although she cannot persuade her cartoonishly mean supervisors to intervene directly. He also has a loyal intern, Han-byul (Hong Seung-hee), who follows him everywhere and provides a point of connection for younger audience members, able to use a different generational skillset to help Hwang when it seems that no-one else can.

The heavy emotional drama here mostly lands on the shoulders of Sol, whilst Do gets to focus more on action. He’s competent enough at communicating fear and frustration, and his youthful looks make Hwang a sympathetic figure, for all that we are told that he’s an ex-Navy SEAL and highly competent. Of course he ends up on the Lunar surface – one imagines that viewers would have been pretty annoyed otherwise – but that’s far from the placid environment that footage of the US missions has taught us. The science is adequately worked out, even if the number of times that thousand to one shots come off starts to get a bit excessive, and there are some real thrills.

The film is too long, and would be more effective overall if some of those twists and turns were cut out, but then, most big budget thrillers today have the same problem. It’s also a little too soapy in places, but that will both native Korean audiences less. Most cinemagoers will be happy enough, however, as it looks great and it really does deliver where it counts. Director Kim makes good use of the combination of vast scale and claustrophobia, fame and isolation. One man’s plight brings political issues, both national and international, into focus, and beyond the various disasters is a bold optimism which reassures audiences that no matter how difficult life on Earth may be becoming, we need not give up on reaching for the stars.

Director: Kim Yong-hwa

Writer: Kim Yong-hwa

Starring: Sol Kyung-gu, Do Kyung-soo, Kim Hee-ae, Jo Han-chul, Amy Aleha

Runtime: 129 minutes

Country: South Korea

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The Moon REVIEW – A Tepid Lunar Experience

Feels like a Michael Bay version of the moon landing.

South Korea’s space program has just launched Woori-ho, their own spacecraft meant to travel to the moon. On board are three astronauts, all from varying fields, bringing with them different skills and expertise. Much like Apollo 13, things go wrong from the get-go, as the shuttle is exposed to solar winds that cut off communication with earth and does damage to the ship. While two of the astronauts are out fixing the exterior, the solar winds pick up again, leading to tragedy, leaving Hwang Sun-woo (Doh Kyung-soo) the only man left alive, having to navigate the mission on his own.

A single person is space has been explored before, in movies like The Martian or Gravity, but we don’t really feel the effect of that here as mission control is a weighty presence in the film. There’s constant cuts between what’s happening in space and the events on earth, and in doing so the film never quite allows us to properly soak in the experience of space. The astronaut talk about heaven and hell in relation to the cosmos, but the film never quite brings us into either experience.

Sun-woo is given but a brief moment to grieve his team, before the momentum kicks in again and the need to move the plot along takes over. There’s also Sun-woo’s complicated relationship with former flight director Kim Jae-guk (Sol Kyung-gu), who failed to prevent his father’s suicide 5 years ago. It feels like a subplot lifted right out of Top Gun: Maverick . The previous shuttle they sent to the moon exploded just before landing, leading everyone involved to feel a sense of guilt, much like Sun-woo’s father and Jae-guk.

The Moon is meant to be blockbuster fare, but it moves at a tepid pace, and we don’t feel any sense of attachment to the characters and their arcs in the film. Maybe because they’re so shallowly developed. Sun-woo’s grief over his fellow astronauts don’t really make us feel anything, since we only had measly scene of them bonding before things went awry. His decision to go on this mission is shaped heavily by his father, but besides a brief moment of the two standing together in a flashback, there is no proper sense of the close relationship he presumably had with his father. He’s given plenty of motive to risk his life and continue the mission, for his father and team members, but we don’t feel the stakes of his decision, or the life-threatening position he’s in.

All that follows in the film is one complication after the other, in a way that feels contrived more than authentic. One moment there’s mention of a meteor shower, the next moment Sun-woo is racing down the moon dodging these meteors like he’s in some action movie. Even the soundscape evokes an action movie vibe – it feels too noisy to be a film set in space. Also, when the tension amps up, you see characters in mission control clutching each other melodramatically, consistently distracting us from Sun-woo’s perilous situation, instead of behaving in a way that would add to the tension.

There are better movies about space out there, and better trips to take than The Moon.

Review screener provided .

READ NEXT: Apollo 13 (1995) | Movies To See Before You Die

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