Duncan Jones’s debut feature as a director is one of those films in which scant resources and budget result in imagination and intensity shifting into overdrive. Nathan Parker’s screenplay is taken from an original story idea by Jones himself; the premise is one of those intriguing little sub-5,000-word blighters you could find in many an SF anthology. Space miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell, Matchstick Men; The Green Mile) is coming to the end of his three year tenure on the Moon harvesting Helium 3 gas, vital to reversing a critical dearth of energy sources on Earth. Sam is lonely; he misses his wife and three-year-old daughter. The inordinately long tour of duty he endures imposed by a corporation calculating every last bean from its enterprise and squeezing every last drop from an employee is set to push anyone beyond the bounds of sanity. Sam whiles away his spare moments whittling the town of Fairfield out of wood with a scalpel and talking to himself and to his plants, which he nurtures to the strains of Mozart. And then there is Gerty, the yellow smiley face computer voiced by Kevin Spacey, always helpful and considerate, always knowing what is best for Sam (no one can quite do insouciant sinister like Spacey). Familiar territory in science fiction terms, then.
 
The influence of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, for one, is inescapable and not only in concept. Rockwell’s performance, like Bruce Dern’s in that earlier cult classic, is possessed of a screen persona that is latently comedic. It is the sort of uneasy humour found in John Carpenter’s Dark Star in which someone might end up tickled to death. These are consciously made directorial comparisons out of which Jones makes a virtue, and does so with considerable wit: Sam doesn’t have an entire revolving space station to jog round like a hamster in a wheel as in Kubrick’s 2001, he has a single treadmill. An in-joke about budget as well as a nod to another classic. And Gerty displays none of the aloof glitz of Hal the computer. Instead it manifests as a network of mechanical arms and power units hanging from ceiling runners throughout the space station, unceremoniously peppered with Post-it notes scrawled with “Kick me” and looking like cast offs from an automated car plant. The claustrophobic space grunge of Ridley Scott’s Alien is another influence, while to make a direct nod to Midnight Cowboy in a science fiction setting is quite a feat.
 
What sets Moon apart from science fiction films with budgets as big as the universe is the dramatic plot twist, not artificially inseminated towards the end of the film, but spawned with infinitely more fertile force less than half way through. The way in which Jones expresses Sam’s sense of confusion and disorientation by inducing exactly those feelings in the audience at this point is brilliantly done. A trip along the lunar surface by buggy to monitor the giant Helium 3 harvesters as they scar big strips across the satellite while spraying waste behind them is bleakness writ in monotone. You are never in any doubt that you are watching existential human crisis here. There is something almost pitiful and vaguely preposterous about that man-made buggy in its endeavours, bouncing across the pock-marked Moon. The visual effects by Cinesite, given the film’s modest budget, are striking and serve only to enhance a mood of aching solitude, as does Clint Mansell’s minimalist, ambient score.
 
Moon is a film with a big theme: the nature of identity and indeed whether we can actually talk of having one as such in any tangible way or are merely an amalgam of impulses and needs at any given point, held together with the illusory notion of the individual (seemingly charted through an equally illusory thing called history). It is ultimately about the fact that life will out, but in and of itself is still doesn’t provide the answer why.
 
Moon’s potentially po-faced concept has what many of those 5,00-word stories I mentioned, often all head and no heart, do not: Sam Rockwell’s compelling central portrayal, a multi-faceted and virtuoso display of humour, angst and pathos. The pre-recorded messages from Sam’s wife (in a couple of deft broadcasts managing to establish Dominique McElligott’s Tess Bell as gorgeous young earth-mother-to-die-for incarnate) and instructions from the offhand corporation guys, feed both Sam and us some disconcertingly elliptical information. It is only in a complete transitional fade to black once too often that you get a sense of a director still working his method through.
 
No mere space oddity, Moon is a film you watch, nominally knowing where it is located, but never quite knowing where it is going, or at what point it might end. The prolonged pauses at certain junctures are deeply unsettling because you begin to dread being suspended forever in the narrative. When you come out of the cinema afterwards, mulling the film over and asking many of the same questions Sam has, in a sense you still are.