The movie surrounds the ordeals of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell, turning in an incredible performance), a astronaut who's stationed on the moon to oversee the mining of Helium 3, a compound that the Earth now relies on for all of its energy needs. His only companion is Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), a Hal-like robot with a yellow smiley face that acts as his helper and sole companion.

He's nearing the end of his three-year contract and is seriously ready to go home. Thanks to some busted communications satellites, he can only communicate with his wife and daughter on the surface via recorded messages, and the isolation has him at the end of his rope.

The real trouble begins when he gets in a rover accident checking on one of the automated mining vehicles that methodically crawl over the surface of the moon. He wakes up in the infirmary with Gerty looking after him. When he goes outside the base to investigate what happened, he finds his crashed vehicle—with him alive inside it.

This, of course, is troubling, and this is where the movie starts to get really interesting. Because both the Sam in the accident and the Sam who woke up in the infirmary are real, and neither knows what the hell the other is doing there.

The mystery of who each of them are and why they're there unravels slowly, and some of the best parts of the movie are them interacting together. Sam Rockwell does an amazing job of making each one instantly distinguishable from the other, and there are some truly stunning special effects used to have them interact together seamlessly. Ever seen a guy play ping pong against himself?

To go too much further into the story would spoil some of the more rewarding reveals, but suffice to say they figure out some pretty unsettling secrets about the lunar mining operation.

The film's themes and setting feel familiar to anyone who's followed sci-fi movies in the past, specifically 2001 and Solaris as well as the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (which is being made into a movie due out next year). Gerty is obviously an homage to Hal, with his soothing monotone and not-quite-human demeanor, but he manages to eclipse your expectations for a sentient space-robot and consistently surprise you.

It's not a flawless movie. While the special effects that make Sam Rockwell able to interact with himself are incredible, the low budget shows through more with the models of the lunar base, which is less than convincing.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The pacing feels off throughout, with large events feeling imminent and then happening without enough impact. And while the story feels like it should pack an emotional wollop, it's just not that affecting in the end. This may have something to do with the fact that, when all is revealed, the motivations behind the explanations aren't entirely justified.

That being said, Moon is definitely worth seeing to anyone interested in slow, heady sci-fi; sci-fi that explores the complex issues we're going to confront when tomorrow's technology is available to us rather than explosions and lasers.

Moon opens tonight in NY and LA.

As the lights dimmed and the familiar Star Trek Federation logo slid on screen, the emotion of all those hours of watching Next Generation reruns as a kid came sloshing back into my brain, dripping out of my eyes as tears of pure happiness. I expect that it was essentially the same emotion Star Wars fans felt during the opening credits of Episode 1, but without the massive letdown afterwards. (Ha ha, suckers.)

But yes, to answer your question, there's Kirk, there's Spock, and there's everyone you expect (even Pike!). Not all of the same mannerisms are there, but if you wanted to see the old actors you'd go watch the first six movies again. This implies that Kirk doesn't do a two-hour Shatner impression, which is, of course, good news. Instead, he plays Kirk as a intelligent, brash, but friendly youngster that has confidence oozing out of every torpedo tube. And the new Spock is more Sylar than Spock, to be honest; though the rest of the casting is essentially spot on.

So long as you go into the movie expecting a "Star Trek" movie, in that there's space and aliens and action and shooting and torpedoes and pew pew pew, you'll come out happy. The movie is targeted enough toward the mainstream in that someone with zero Trek experience would enjoy it. Director J.J. Abrams also gives enough shout outs to old time staples that trekkers will be giddy at the slight nods and fanservice that say, in essence, "thank you for supporting us all these years, now here's something you asked for."

Think of it like Casino Royale was to the James Bond franchise: fewer gadgets, more action and an incredibly pugilistic lead. And lens flares. Lots, and lots, and lots of lens flares.

Kirk's Enterprise has never looked better. These guys took the original ship, combined it with some designs of the Enterprise-B, then mashed it up with Picard's Enterprise-E and then added a dash of '60s non-Trek Sci Fi. The set design, however, is almost all touchscreen (like TNG), but with a tremendously updated UI. I'd hate to call it Apple-y, but there's lots of glass and slick white finishes. Retro this is not—you'll barely be able to equate the bridge to the original's, other than the fact that the players are all sitting in the right places. Why Bones canoodles in the bridge so much instead of where he's supposed to be is still beyond me.

And the plot? The plot makes as much sense as any other Star Trek movie. There's even a very good explanation of why this movie is the way it is, which is the most I can say about that.

This is what Star Trek needs right now. After writing on Next Generation, Ron Moore went on (about a decade later) to reimagine Battlestar Galactica, a relatively realistic show (topic-wise) that just happened to be set in space. Sci Fi fans have moved on from the utopian, and what many accused as sterile, confines of TNG to a grittier, less kempt future.

That's not to say Star Trek is now gritty—it's just more...modern. And more sexy. Like when you upgrade from a six piece KFC meal to a 12 piece bucket: you're going to get more breast and thigh.

It also doesn't have any crap about the Prime Directive or any undertones about race that TOS and TNG dealt with, but it is a very good "restart" of the franchise. With this film as the base, I cannot wait to see where the franchise goes from here.

Bonus: there's a four-issue Star Trek: Countdown comic series that prequels the movie. Though, you might want to wait until after you watch to read, since it gives away a few plot points. To tell you more would be to spoil too much. It's too much even to tell you what KIND of fans would like the comic. You can download the first one here for your iPhone.

To start with, real multitouch makes a stellar appearance with a giant Microsoft-Surface-style table which Judi Dench—the head of MI6—and other agents use with ease, simultaneously. In fact, the user interface on the table—albeit adorned for the required Hollywood eye candy—actually makes sense and is extremely attractive, gestures included. Everything on it is doable with current technology, even the part in which they place a dollar bill and it gets automatically scanned and identified.

There's also the huge video wall at M's office. Unlike the multitouch surface, this is a CGI effect. However, with enough money and the use of transparent OLED technology and gesture recognition, the video wall is also perfectly doable. In fact, I saw something similar in my visit to Philips Labs last August, although that transparent video wall—a simulation of a glass storefront—used projection rather than OLEDs.

Only a couple of technologies were exaggerated. One was Bond's cellphone camera capabilities—with 007 taking pictures of faces with 3D depth of field information from a very long distance. The other was the speed of data transmission between the cellphone and MI6's headquarters. However, you can perfectly imagine that all that may be real in the military world and just not available to consumers, specially looking at some of the latest camera and communications research.

But what really makes this movie is not the technology. Yes, it plays an important role: Bond gets geolocation information on the baddies, and he uses his camera to get some of their pics, which then are analyzed and cross-referenced by MI6 databases. But none of it is a gimmick. There is no magic zippo lighter capable of launching kinetic rocket fire balls and save the day at the end of the movie. The technology in Quantum of Solace is realistic and it integrates naturally into the film, it flows with the plot.

What makes it the best Bond movie ever is what makes an action movie good. The script to start with. Serious, but also witty, and with the right amount of reality stretching. It even has an underlying social theme, which is interesting and relates to the current world's political climate. Marc Forster's direction makes you wish he directed Indiana Jones IV. His movie runs like clockwork, with the action scenes being masterfully choreographed and filmed, and painting a deeper, much more complex portrait of not only Bond, but also M, who gets a lot more presence in this one (and is Judy bloody Dench. I rest my case).

And then there is Bond himself. Daniel Craig really makes the movie work with his presence alone. He's a badass, but feels absolutely human. He has flair and a taste for luxury—wait until he arrives to Bolivia to see what I mean—but he gets gritty and dirty all the time. He could be a psychopath, but you can see that he has heart. He can seduce a women into bed like the best Connery would do, but you can actually see that he cares about her. You can feel that he is a hopeless romantic below the cold surface. A guy consumed by the need of vengeance and the contradiction of being betrayed by the love of his life. Yet, at the same time, he still loves her to the point of risking everything, even while she is dead.

And he likes cocktails.

Yes. Go. See it. Now.

(I'm going to try and get through this review without spoilers.)

First off, the gadgets. The Batmobile is back, and so is Batman's upgraded fighting suit. He's not residing in Wayne Manor anymore after the events of the Batman Begins, so he has to make do with hiding his Bat-gear inside Wayne Towers and various locales around the city. Batman makes do. He's a hero in exile, a thread that continues through to the end of the movie and on to the next.

There's a very good minor plot device that centers around cellphones that would be pretty damn awesome if it we could get our hands on it in real life. Who knows...maybe the government's already using it now. Plus there's are great scenes in the air, both with a plane and "without". He's really earning that "Bat" part of his name.

As good as Christian Bale is as Bats, the real stars of THIS movie are the Joker and Harvey Dent. If there is ever a character that is the complete opposite of the Dark Detective—cold, calculating, and completely logical—it's the Joker. He's simultaneously insane and extremely insane, taking apart bit by bit the fragile peace that Batman has strived to build since the first movie. There is so little logic to the joker that he's probably the one person whose moves Batman can't predict.

What's great about this movie isn't just the writing and the special effects (though they both are still stellar), it's that everything FEELS exactly like you'd imagine Batman and his villains to be in real life. There's even traces of realistic crime flicks like Heat going on throughout, which lends more to making guys as ludicrous on paper as Batman and the Joker believable. How would you portray a man whose sole intent, as Alfred says, is to watch the world burn? This is how. Gone is affable clownish uncle figure that Jack Nicholson played in the 1989 Batman, and in his place is a character that if you saw on the street, you should run away from as fast as you fucking can. Us gadget fans relate more towards with Batman's logic than Joker's lunacy, which is why he's going to be the best villain you'll ever seen in a superhero flick.

See this movie. Go buy this ticket right now and print it out at your office. We didn't get to see it in IMAX, but a good 20 minutes of the film was shot in the format, so we're definitely going to go back and catch it again. In fact, we've been trying to wrap our heads around all the different themes and nuances that Chris Nolan crammed in; ideas that are even more subtle than they were in the first. A second viewing would do us good.

(You'll notice we didn't mention much about Harvey Dent/Two Face in this review. We'll leave that bit of plot for you to discover yourselves.)