Elliptical orbit

Sam Rockwell stars in the interesting but unsatisfying low-budget sci-fi flick Moon

SPACE CADET: Sam Rockwell

Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on why exactly you don’t like a movie. This is the thing with Moon: I’m pretty much down with the premise, the setting and the actors (actually, actor, singular, would be more appropriate) involved, but the movie as a whole just rubbed me the wrong way. It’s almost more frustrating than outright hating a movie when you’re into a movie’s individual elements but they don’t gel properly.

Directed by Duncan Jones (né Zowie Bowie) in his feature debut, Moon is of a genre I’d like to see more of: intelligent, low-budget science fiction with more of an emphasis on ideas than action. Well, at least in theory—one of this film’s problems is that Jones seems to have had some trouble balancing the need for genre thrills and a more sophisticated character study, with the result ending up neither here nor there.

The movie is a showcase of sorts for the always-excellent Sam Rockwell. He plays Sam Bell, the sole occupant of a lunar mining base. He’s responsible for the extraction and exporting of a substance that, in the movie’s fictional future, has solved Earth’s energy problems. But, all alone up there and with only a few weeks left on his three-year shift, he’s going a bit nuts. His only companion is a HAL 9000-esque robotic companion voiced by Kevin Spacey, so things get a little weird when he runs into someone else on the base… who happens to be his doppelganger.

For most of the film, Moon teases the viewer with the question of whether what we’re watching is a psychological breakdown or a more concrete, sci-fi-ish conceit. To its credit, it does come down on that question unambiguously, though I didn’t find the resolution quite satisfying enough. (Sorry to be so vague, but I don’t want to spoil anything.)

There were also just some basic questions that bothered me throughout the film: is one person really enough to run a delicate mining operation that’s providing Earth with all of its power? And though I liked how the screenplay deliberately left some questions up to the viewer to deduce, there were just too many distracting implausibilities thrown in there. Jones deserves credit for ingenuity but Moon is ultimately an interesting failure.

MOON OPENS THIS FRIDAY, JULY 3