A small, personal story wrapped in the trappings of classic sci-fi epic, Moon manages to be both derivative (most notably, of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, but with only a touch of that film’s monumental pessimism) and deliberately rebellious in its treatment of sci-fi tropes. Moving through familiar territory and yet sparked with a spirit all its own, like any great work of genre cinema Moon’s future-world scenario and super-slick techno-artistry are put to the service of a story that ultimately downplays the traumas wrought by technological possibility in order to dig deep into the traumas of people being people.

The film, directed by Duncan Jones (once known as Zowie Bowie, son of David), begins with a pitch-perfect advert for the company that contracts an astronaut named Sam (Sam Rockwell) to live and work on a space station for a three year stretch, accompanied only by a HAL-meets-Short Circuit robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and able to communicate with his wife and child on Earth only via taped video message. Wedding exposition (the ad is how we learn that the massive machines to which Sam tends on auto-pilot are “harvesting solar energy frpm the dark side of the moon”), to a sense of ease that’s too, almost unsettlingly easy, the opening sequence perfectly sets the tone for the coming inquiry into a fractured personality and the relationship between surface and depth.

Moon relies on a major twist to set this inquiry into motion, one which I’d feel criminal in giving away. Suffice it to say that Sam is at once not as alone as he thought he thought he was, and as fundamentally, incontrovertibly lonely as anyone could ever be. This dramatization of Sam’s sudden, tragic self-awareness gives Rockwell a platform for a terrifically exciting dual performance which, thanks to seamless, non-showy effects and a magic of chemistry, allows Moon to feels more casual and accessible than any cinematic exploration of the Lacanian mirror stage has a right to be.

What marks Moon as a potential sci-fi game changer is the complexity of its philosophy on The Future, one which allows for both limitless faith in human feeling and a skepticism over the human cost of innovation, particularly in regards to Saving The Planet. 2001 predicts that the more human-like machines become, the more they’ll take on the worst of humanity and, as an added bonus, that humans will lose the passion and compassion that makes them human in direct proportion to the degree to which they engineer machines to become more human-like. Moon approaches a similar scenario from a very different tack, imagining that the artificial intelligence that humans create will embody the best of what humanity can be, but will probably be used to the ends of, if not evil, than at least the individual-indifferent banality that keeps a capitalist society ticking along.

The timing is a bit uncanny. Is this a projection into a post- (or maybe post-post-post-) Obama world, in which “no drama” promises of a better tomorrow simply placate us into ignoring that even the most utopian visions of “change” must be fed into the capitalist machine in order to become a reality, and will likely be contracted out to the higest bidder even at the expense of human lives? Corporate culture bears the burden of Moon’s cynicism, but that critique is part and parcel of a film about self-knowledge, and the tragedy of stumbling upon it only when it’s nearly too late.