Duncan Jones' acclaimed Moon arrived on DVD and Blu-ray today, so if you haven't seen it yet, make it a priority. It's a confident debut film from Jones, and it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best sci-fi movies of the past year, with a bravura performance by Sam Rockwell and an interesting, unpredictable story.

It also shares a thematic link with two of its higher-profile peers from 2009 -- James Cameron's Avatar and Neill Blomkamp's District 9. Science-fiction often reflects larger issues at hand in our world, and I've been trying to sort out exactly what it means to see three films in 2009 that all deal with a de-humanizing loss of personal identity.

(If you're averse to spoilers, you might want to stop reading and come back after you've seen all three films.)

In District 9, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) faces the horror of turning into an insect-like alien after being sprayed with a mysterious liquid. Wikus' transformation into a "Prawn" provides District 9 with an undercurrent of Cronenbergian horror -- the metamorphosis looks painful and nasty, and Wikus becomes a societal outcast and a fugitive as his body transforms. At the start of the film, Wikus is portrayed as a company man dim-bulb, ham-strung by his own ignorance for the task of transporting an entire race of alien lifeforms from one ghetto to another. He's not the same man by the end of the film, neither physically nor emotionally. He's humbled by the experience, brought low by his own mistakes and his selfishness to find a way to reverse his physical change. In an unusually downbeat, moralistic ending for a blockbuster film, Wikus is now forced to wait years for a possible cure amongst the very people he was paid to mistreat. No matter what happens next, the world he knew is gone from him forever

The same is true for Avatar's Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), but his resignation of a human life in favor of becoming a Na'vi is a joyful decision. In fact, the movie's pay-off is almost the direct opposite of District 9's. Again, a corporate stooge ill-suited for a job beyond his comprehension mucks things up royally when asked to get some aliens to move from Point A to Point B. Sully tries to do the right thing in the end (like Wikus), but, unlike Wikus, Sully is rewarded for his "my bad" apology with a hero's welcome, the girl of his dreams, and a new pair of (bright blue) legs. He leaves his human life behind because his human life wasn't all that great anyway. It's a willful loss of identity, embracing a new alien life with a childlike "no questions asked" enthusiasm.

Moon presents a much stickier situation. In it, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) discovers that his whole existence has become his job, lonely, monotonous work that requires him to extract clean energy gases from the lunar surface. His nightmarish revelation is that Sam Bell, the man he thinks he is, is long gone, and that he's just another clone in a series of Sam Bell ringers. The life he thinks he knows is a distant memory, recycled from the original Sam Bell's life. Complicating matters is a another clone of Sam Bell, one that the Bell we know accidentally awakens, who can't grasp the idea that he's part of a Sam Bell workforce, created for perpetual slavery on the Moon. Sam Bell's personal identity is meaningless. He's human, but created to work. His life and memories are artifice and the only reality is steadfast employment.

All three films show us something about how we relate to our jobs in the twenty-first century, playing into our fears of an uncertain future were we might be forced to become our job. The theme is most easily seen in Moon, but in District 9 it takes a bit of a backseat to its more thrilling action-movie elements. In Avatar it's almost drowned out completely by big-budget sound and fury, but it's there -- Sully breaks from his job to become the person he didn't know he was (a person who just happens to be an alien).

I worry about a future where I'll work until I'm dead. My grandparents had retirement, but without the kind of dedicated career they had, I'll probably end up working well into my golden years. Right now I'm unmarried and without children, and I'm not getting any younger. My biggest fear at the moment is losing my own identity to just keep working, saying goodbye to the things that I want for myself in exchange for a future where my job does nothing more than keep me alive from day to day. I don't want to look up in twenty more years and discover that I've buried my self under meaningless work -- that the old me is gone, that I'm just another cog in the wheel.

District 9, Avatar, and Moon are comforting in some small way. They let me know that my fears are not specific to me alone. They're big enough concerns to everyone that they've worked their way into three very different films, and all three offer a glimmer of hope to those afraid of losing their identity to the demands of a job that threatens to define them forever.