Sam Rockwell is a man who wants to fall to Earth.

Even though it’s ultimately not the full-bodied triumph that it might have been, there is much to recommend Duncan Jones’ small-scale, engrossing 2009 sci-fi feature, Moon.

In his debut, Jones tells the story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), an employee of Lunar, a company that has solved the global energy crisis by harnessing the power of sunlight as it reflects off the moon.

Sam is nearly at the end of a three-year hitch at a mining station on the moon, and is getting antsy about being away from his wife and daughter and being all alone. Of course, he isn’t completely alone.

There’s a HAL-ish computer that speaks in deadpan (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and there’s a clone of Sam that appears one day without warning. Adding to Sam’s headaches are his deteriorating health and faltering space equipment. He has to figure out what’s going on and get his tin can back home.

Writer-director Jones is David Bowie’s son, and Moon owes a debt to ’70s sci-fi films like The Man Who Fell to Earth, a starring vehicle for his dad. While the story isn’t quite developed enough, Moon succeeds because of Rockwell’s magnificent performance(s), and Jones’ gifts for mood, visual design and ability to express a sense of dread that echoes our fears in an age when almost anything seems possible. And the genre pic also works well as a parable about the endlessness and redundancy of warfare.

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