Tykho Moon (1996)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) I did not like Tykho Moon – it’s dull, ugly, surprisingly conventional in plot elements and utterly inept in terms of science fiction ideas. On the other hand, it’s a fascinating film that illustrates how much of a gulf there can be between concepts and execution. If I tell you that it’s a sombre espionage/succession tale set on the Moon in a dictatorial future, you’re probably imagining the high-tech immersion required to portray such a tale – the fancy special effects, the details to show a lived-in future, possibly a few sequences at one-sixth Earth’s gravity. But Tykho Moon laughs at your presumptions. It shoots the entire film in grimy industrial settings somewhere in the Parisian suburbs, makes no effort to visualize its otherworldly nature (except for a single unimpressive special-effects shot toward the end) and ignores just about anything to do with the realities of what a lunar settlement would look like. Other than a few clichés about future disease, it also works on an incredibly pedestrian level when it comes to plotting, with depressingly trite plot mechanics and not much in terms of satisfaction. Like the incomparably superior Alphaville, it voluntarily uses its low budget as an excuse to dissociate what we see from what we expect to see in a science-fiction tale. It becomes a surreal exercise in detachment, exploring matters of form versus presentation. I certainly didn’t like it (and I like it less and less the longer I go on writing this review) but it makes for an unusual object lesson in opposing the content of Science Fiction versus its presentation. The lesson would be far more eloquent if it had some substance on the plotting side and a more deliberate approach on the presentation side (rather than fill a room with trash and calling it a day), but Tykho Moon is all about disappointment anyway.