In the new sci-fi drama Moon, Sam Rockwell goes were many actors in sci-fi dramas have gone before: slightly mad due to a reality altering paradox in the loneliness of space. Or the tranquility of our desolate lunar satellite, in this instance. As astronaut Sam Bell, Rockwell confronts another space odyssey oldie but goldie: the doppelganger. Where does he come from? Who is he? Is that me, and if it is me, then who am I? Indeed Moon is a veritable buffet of all the things that make thinking man’s science fiction hit the heights that bake our noodles. Rockwell plays things beautifully, and while the film is finely crafted, I can’t help but feel that it’s not as smart as it thinks it is.

Bell is the sole human manning a mining colony on the Moon’s surface. Thanks to an element found in the lunar soil that makes fusion possible, the Earth gets 70 per cent of its energy supply from this clean, near-limitless energy source thanks to Lunar Industries and the efforts of Bell. Bell is winding down the last few weeks of his three year contract and is feeling anxious to get home to see his wife and young daughter. Some slight hallucinations are to be expected now and again, after all he’s spent three years in the company of no one but the robot with a smiley face named GERTY (creepily voiced by Kevin Spacey doing a riff on Douglas Rain’s Hal 9000 from 2001).

While inspecting the mining machines one morning, Bell has an accident in his lunar rover and later wakes up in the medical bay of the station. But if his injuries are so minor then why does it seem to take him so long to recover? And what’s with GERTY’s strange behaviour and not letting him outside the confines of the station once he’s recovered? Well here we are about to veer into SPOILER territory, so you’ve been warned, but once Bell is able to leave the station he visits the accident scene and finds in the rover the injured, but still living, Bell. So what’s the story? How are their two of them? Alternate dimension? Space-time doohickey thingamajig? Not quite.

The story is that both of the Bells are actually a clone of some original Bell who was the first caretaker of the mining operation. After his three year contract expired, Bell was apparently cloned by the company a hundred times with GERTY left to facility the transfer of one clone to the other through the accident ruse. Thus, the company is spared the cost of having to train and send someone new to the Moon as well as bringing the previous guy back to Earth every three years. (Apparently even in the wake of cheap, limitless energy, future corporations are still shockingly frugal when it comes to the human factor.) I’m not sure if writer/director Duncan Jones had intended to make the whole clone thing a big reveal, but I called it moments after Bell revived in the medical bay with no memory of the accident and looking a bit like Neo having been recently unplugged from the Matrix.

Although the film is excellently staged with great drama and claustrophobic design, I didn’t find the story all that great. The story more or less unfolds as expected with both Bells discovering just how clone-y they are and accepting the possibility that the home they dreamed of for all those years was a figment of false hopes and a bunch of pre-programmed memories they didn’t really live. What should be complexity is really the same yarn spun by everyone from Dick to Ellison to Roddenberry all those years ago. That’s not to say that such a story is unwelcome though. Certainly any attempt to make something with dramatic heft that isn’t hung on giant robots, laser blasters or the Force is most welcome.

Also welcome is the low key, old school model effects employed by the filmmakers to create work-a-day life on the lunar surface. There’s still something very tangible and tactile about the use of models, and it’s nice to see a major film still recognize that. As for matters more human, I think not enough great things can be said about Rockwell’s tour de force performance that commands of him to play not just against a box with Kevin Spacey’s voice, but also himself. The way that Jones presents the story, almost like some kind of futuristic urban legend, is also fascinating and it definitely gives the old story of the man in the moon a devilish spin. Haunted, but not necessarily haunting, Moon is a great example of minimalism in sci-fi, I just wish that the story was stronger and not as predictable.