by Katy Darby

What red-blooded sci-fi fan doesn’t long for the beautiful, lonely, future meditations of the golden age of Hollywood in space? Films like Saturn 3 (scripted – I shit you not – by Martin Amis), Solaris, 2001, Alien … Blade Runner … well, you get the picture. Or perhaps you don’t. Because – George Clooney’s ill-advised Solaris remake aside – there hasn’t been anything very much like Moon for a very long time, and more’s the pity. Science fiction tends to ally itself far more these days with its (supposedly) sibling genres of horror and action-adventure – hence some interesting successes like Pitch Black, and some highminded failures such as Sunshine (great idea, crappy ending).

But Moon is here to change all that. It boasts Alien’s believably knackered interiors – all crumpled Post-Its and desktop photos of loved ones, as if the cast of The Office had been forced to live on the set of 2001 – and a grainy, low-fi approach to the exterior shots that renders them far more believable than a thousand Lucasian CGI effects. It also stars Sam Rockwell and … well, Sam Rockwell. Not to spoil it for anyone, but solo Moon station maintenance man Sam Bell soon finds himself far from alone at the end of his three-year contract with Lunar Industries. He thinks he’s doing fine, talking to his wife and little girl via pre-recorded video messages, creating an insanely detailed model village of his hometown, and growing some pretty startling facial hair, but this all changes when he comes round from a crash in a moon-buggy to find himself staring up at a far healthier, sharper and fitter version of himself. Conflict of interest? I’ll say.

Interestingly, the story does not go as predicted from here on in – which is to say, as a thousand other paranoia-in-space flicks have done. GERTY, the helpful computer voiced by Kevin Spacey, is actually helpful, and the initial frostiness between old Sam and new Sam melts rather than leads to them stalking one another, spanners in hand, through the lost corridors beneath the station. Even the vexed question of which one of them is the “real” Sam is solved in a poignant and original way, and the denouement is genuinely beautiful and heart-wrenching, though not without hope.

I can’t say any more without giving the game away; but trust me, if you like your films, science fiction or not, to deliver on both an emotional and a philosophical level, you can’t do better than Moon. It’s still on for a bit at selected cinemas and the ever-brilliant Prince Charles in Leicester Square is showing it all next week, too, so no excuses: catch Moon while it’s still shining.

Moon by Nathan Parker, directed by Duncan Jones (Various cinemas)

Starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey as the voice of GERTY