Moon takes place in and around a remote mining station on the dark side of the moon, where a lone human occupant, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), supervises the automated extraction of a substance called Helium-3 from the lunar surface. His job is to tend to the machinery and send the harvested material back to Earth to be turned into clean, abundant energy.

Sam has been there for almost three years, alone except for a helper robot called GERTY and a stream of video messages and television shows from home. His contract is about to end. And he’s starting to see things.

Director Duncan Jones has crafted Moon as a tribute to the heady SF films of his youth – 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Silent Running, Dark Star, Alien. Sam’s relationship with GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey, doing a HAL 9000 impersonation) is just the most direct nod.

Jones has clearly embraced that era’s cynical vision of a future where humanity has gained the stars but lost its soul, reducing individual astronauts to mere data points – or worse, numbers on a corporate balance sheet, to be shifted around like cargo as the situation warrants.

But he makes the mistake of pitching his film at the same slow, elegant pace without enough story to sustain a feature. Moon starts to buckle under the strain of its cleverness about half an hour in, as little details – meant to be noticed on second viewing – linger in plain sight long enough to let the viewer solve the movie’s mysteries long before its characters have the chance.

This could have been a great short film. At a third – or even a quarter – of the length, we wouldn’t have time to think about anything we see; we’d just be caught up in the twisting, convoluted ride.

Instead, it’s an hour and a half of very familiar imagery, held together by a storyline that isn’t quite as airtight as Jones thinks it is.

Despite the perfectly replicated visuals and moody, atmospheric sound design – and the technical marvel of Rockwell’s increasingly complicated performance – Jones never manages to transcend his references and create a movie capable of standing on its own, as Danny Boyle did two years ago with Sunshine. Moon may look and sound like a real, live movie, but it’s just a clone.

normw@nowtoronto.com