I’m incredibly glad that even in this Twitter-enabled world I managed to avoid pretty much all plot details of this movie, and if you haven’t seen it yet, so should you. With that warning, I’ll still try to avoid any spoilers here as best I can. This movie completes a hat-trick of pleasant surprises for me this week, for though I’d heard many positive words about Moon, though I’m not a bit averse to the genre, though I think Sam Rockwell is a great actor and I’d seen an interesting interview with its director Duncan Jones on Robert Llewelyn’s Carpool, I still didn’t really feel that compelled to watch it.

This is, I’ve learned recently, what’s known as hard sci-fi – in this case, perhaps the hardest kind. There’s virtually nothing here that struck me as particularly far-fetched in terms of its vision of the (fairly near) future, even though the sci-fi aspect of the movie is not really what rings most true. I found myself drawn in and ultimately transfixed by where the story goes in the end, a seriously harrowing degeneration, both mental and physical, that brought to mind something like “When the Wind Blows” combined with revelations about a very recognisable corporate evil to whom human life is entirely expendable (to continue the wild genre-hopping comparisons, this complete disregard for human life in pursuit of capitalism reminded me of Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation). In short, way heavier stuff than I might’ve expected from what is a relatively small movie.

One thing I had known before the movie began was how it is almost entirely a one man show by Sam Rockwell. I’d seen the IMDb cast list and knew this not to be technically true, however, with Kevin Spacey on hand as the ship’s HAL-like computer (complete with very unsettling emoticon faces) and a wife and child on the end of a video communications link, but for all its visual wonder – with intricate model work instead of the CGI you’d find in most recent movies of this kind – it’s testament to good writing and acting indeed (to say nothing of Clint Mansell’s alternately unsettling and emotive score) that I could easily imagine this working as a one man stage play. Rockwell is phenomenal, easily the best performance I’ve seen this year so far – there’s one moment in particular which is actually kind of played twice (for reasons I won’t explain) where he receives some information from earth and breaks down, “That’s enough … I wanna go home,” he says, and it totally crushed me. This is the kind of sci-fi that even those who don’t consider themselves sci-fi fans should enjoy, where the “science part”, though amply established (it’s a slow burner but stick with it), serves merely as a kind of McGuffin for one of the most genuine explorations of the conundrum of human existence that I’ve ever seen.