Director Jones (son of the original space oddity, David Bowie) who thought up the story and Nathan Parker, the screenwriter, are both making feature debuts here and their work hangs together pretty well.
A pre-title sequence uses a TV ad for Lunar Industries to set the scene: in a near future, the world's energy crisis has been solved by the discovery a fuel called Helium 3, of which there is an endless supply in lunar rock.
Sam Bell (Rockwell), the sole-charge operator of a moon mine, is nearing the end of a three-year shift. His only company is a talking computer (Spacey), which sounds disarmingly like HAL-9000 in
2001: A Space Odyssey
but also cuts Sam's hair and hassles him to have lunch. And his only human contact is by out-of-sync recorded exchanges with his earthbound wife (McElligott) and daughter - real-time communication is down because of a damaged satellite.
The first half-hour is deceptively full of implausibilities and plot holes, all of which the well-structured story neatly plugs as the details become clearer.
Sam is joined by the most improbable of visitors - someone who may be even more himself than he is - and the film abruptly becomes a quite engaging thriller, which demands and gets a pair of bravura performances from Rockwell.
Shooting on sound stages at Shepperton Studios in England and with pleasingly little use of CGI, Jones creates a plausibly grubby space station in which Bell struggles to make a human environment in a utilitarian workplace.
The movie's underlying theme - that the military-industrial complex cannot prosper without sacrificing expendable humans - is none too original and the ending feels abrupt and unsatisfying, as if the filmmakers didn't know quite where to go with their idea.
But it's a satisfyingly intelligent, alien-free space flick that's well worth the price of admission.
Peter Calder
Cast:
Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott
Director:
Duncan Jones
Running time:
97 mins
Rating:
M (offensive language)
