We aren’t supposed to have movies like Moon anymore. They went away a long time ago in the Great Sci-Fi Purge of the early 1980s. These thoughtful character studies and simple space allegories used to crowd the marketplace in the 1970s, as every would-be Kubrick worth his salt attempted to copy or further explicate on the prodigious themes of 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst carving out an entity all its own. A lot of them failed, and often rightfully so, but they had class, and they had their own grainy style to back up their game attempts to find a new cinematic language for confronting society. The 1980s had many casualties, and this sort of smart, reasonably artistic entertainment for adults was probably the biggest. Youth growing up today might take it for granted that science fiction has always been a middleweight genre for fluffy summer fun, but this has not always been so. Once upon a time, science fiction was a highly personal realm. Often great (Kubrick). Often awful (Ed Wood). Widely fluctuating and seldom simply “mediocre”. But, through thick and thin, it was always personal.

Duncan Jones, here making his feature-length debut, remembers this time (he should too, his own dad David Bowie starred in more than his fair share of oddball sci-fi treats from the waning era of exploratory science fiction). His Moon is the story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), an isolated space farer in charge of a mining facility on the moon (mining a helium-3 isotope that has ended Earth’s energy crisis, but this is not germane to the story per-se). It is an elegant, almost classical theater-piece about humankind in both its singular/ concrete and abstracted/ conceptual forms. Bell is at once a lonely human, standing right up against the precipice of returning to society after a three year service alone on the moon, and a stand-in for “humankind” more generally. For the first half of the film, one-of-our-greatest-living-actors Sam Rockwell, in what is easily his greatest performance yet, gives the sort of masterclass-in-loneliness performance that just begs to drive a performer insane.

But it is in the second-half of the film that Jones’ storytelling really shines (ably abetted by Nathan Parker’s screenplay, working from an idea and outline by Jones). To spoil that which everyone knows now, he encounters a second version of himself, another Sam Bell. Here, and wonderfully at that, the film evolves into a fascinating, perplexing, almost magnificent dissection and exploration of humankind as a concept, and specifically the dividing line between man and machine as we begin to question whether Bell really lives and breathes like a human, or is simply a mechanical construction designed to resemble one. It is talky, of course, but never pretentious, partially due to Rockwell’s breathlessly nervy and fleshy performance, and partially because he is surrounded by some really fresh and lively filmmaking that leaves sufficient mystery and implication in place in the finished project.

It’s never outright stated whether the second Bell is present in the flesh or whether Bell is simply losing his mind, but the implication remains true either way: mankind, starved for technology and surrounding itself by the loneliness of sleek, functional mechanization, has lost its soul and locked itself into a situation where physical necessity clashes with mental and emotional necessity. It has trapped itself alone, both in that its world is now dominated by machines, and in that it is willing to place a man in perpetual loneliness for a three year span. Two possibilities exist: Bell was always a facsimile of a human and never really alive, or he was a human who became a machine in that his life became dominated by the rote-ness of machines and routine loneliness at the expense of human contact. That the film artfully never tells us which it is pursuing narratively blends the literal and the conceptual and captures the sense in which the distinction between humans and machines is evaporating both physically and mentally. Whether or not Bell is truly a literal “machine”, he is mimicking one in the way he paces the halls and goes through the same habits and has no social existence outside himself. He is not human or machine, but a human that is a machine in a world where there is no longer any difference.

All of this is without mentioning the more casual strengths of the first half of the film that linger on into the weightier material and really fill in the world so that the more existential delights are free to fly. Beyond the matter-of-fact depiction of loneliness, the storytelling really benefits from its fly-on-the-wall exploration of life on the moon so that we never really know more than Bell. This puts us in the dark as to the state of Earth, never really telling us anything about the three year period he is away that he doesn’t know, drawing us into his life and his detachment from the world by keeping us in the dark too. For all the talking, there is an elegant excision of any and all exposition from the film such that we are only given the bare minimum amount of information we need to get by.

Then, we have GERTY, a remarkably smug, delicious little Kevin Spacey performance as an AI that plays like HAL 9000 with a naughty lemon twist. The way Jones and Spacey infuse GERTY with a personality that relies on our familiarity with the gold standard of movie AIs but doesn’t copy or mimic that AI is key to the film’s success. It forces us to reconcile what we know about science fiction with this film, drawing on our expectations and funneling us down one path of storytelling that the film then goes on to subvert and challenge. This GERTY makes us think it is HAL by courting 2001, but GERTY, and the film that contains it, is an entirely different beast with a different role to play in the world.

Elsewhere, for such a minimal film, it’s a real achievement as a work of construction, privileging hard, tactile, practical effects work and lighting at all times to explore the delicate lived-in nature of the world and the “used universe” quality many ascribe to classics like 2001 and especially Alien. There’s a wonderful, knowing use of negative spaces throughout that emphasize what we don’t know and can’t see over everything else, and there’s this great sense of emptiness persistent throughout. The way everything looks usable and functional and the technology coats the film in this sleek, ready-made, sense of artificial, hand-crafted purpose creates a world whole-cloth that never once feels overly ornate or ornamental but always has a real and purposeful demeanor. It feels, in other words, like what a piece of future-tech fifty or so years on from now would, and it does wonders for making Moon all the livelier and more provocative as a work of speculative fiction that is very much about the present day. The set design is also simply one of the many surpluses working in Moon’s favor to establish Duncan Jones as a leading light for popular genre filmmaking for the next generation of (hopefully) more commonplace intelligent science fiction. His debut is a legitimately great work of thoughtful storytelling on multiply planes of existence, and if it doesn’t best any of its influences, it deserves to sit in their company.

Score: 9/10