“Moon,” an independent film directed by Duncan Jones, is a refreshing piece of science fiction. This is not what I’m used to seeing in the theaters. Hollywood science fiction is usually just a fantastical kind of action movie, roaring across the screen in a blaze of guns, heroes, monsters, exploding chase scenes and latex-wrapped boobs.

As a viewer, I’m lucky. I enjoy those manic spectacles (even the boobs) but as someone who loves science fiction stories, I’m usually left unsatisfied. The depth of character I like to read about is most often missing. The problems people face in sci-fi movies are always galactic in scale, not human.

“Moon” is human. “Moon” satisfies.

It begins simply enough. In the near future, a single corporate-paid astronaut is stationed on the far side of the moon. His name is Sam Bell and his job is to oversee the automated harvesting of Helium-3. Sam has lived on the moon for almost three years. His contract is about to expire and he’s itching to return home.

Rating:

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Written by: Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker

Staring: Sam Rockwell

It’s hard for me to imagine what life so long alone would do to a person, but actor Sam Rockwell does an excellent job of portraying a man who can handle it – yet has become a little crazed. He moves in an understated shuffle, he twitches, he wears a ragged beard and marks the few remaining days as a series of smiley faces on a discreet corner of his moon base.

The look of the base is also understated and pitch-perfect. The smooth white curves of a NASA future are dented and scuffed. It’s stocked with timelessly chunky, overbuilt equipment. One of these is Sam Bell’s only companion, a robotic assistant called GERTY (voiced by Keven Spacey).

GERTY is little more than a computer screen and a robotic arm attached to a track on the ceiling. It talks to Sam in a too-calm voice very reminiscent of the amoral computer HAL from “2001, A Space Odyssey.” GERTY, however, is surprisingly honest and pure, even when his goals aren’t in Sam’s best interests. GERTY becomes a kind of anti-HAL.

This reflects the charming honesty of much of the movie. Many times when I expected cliché twists, it shocked me by playing straight. I kept expecting a plot of cheap-thrill deceptions but “Moon” transcended that with a steady hand, even when the story started to go weird.

And it does go weird. The plot reminds me of Fredric Brown’s famously short story:

The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

In this case Sam Bell is called onto the surface of the moon to correct the course of a roving hydrogen-3 extractor. This machine looks like a huge combine harvester crossing moonscape so colorless it might as well be Dorothy’s Kansas, stripped down to dust. When Sam finally reaches the machine, he finds someone already there.

“Moon” is, at heart, a mystery.

Since the movie dips into themes of identity, change, solitude, and perceptions of reality. I would have expected the kind of sleight-of-hand movie that never really tells the audience what’s going on. That’s not it at all – in fact it speaks to the brilliance of this film. Certainly, some of the threads are left for us to decide their meaning. Most notability, Sam has a brief hallucination and it is up to the observer to decide if it had any meaning beyond expressing that he was very ill. Some viewers might find these annoying, but I felt that every mystery important to core plot was resolved. I like a movie that asks me to pay attention and draw my own conclusions.

I’d recommend “Moon” to a wide spectrum of tastes. If you like science fiction, mystery, human drama or slow-boil adventure – see this. Pass on it only if you’re in more of an exploding-gun-fight/cheeky-sidekick mood, and don’t want a movie that asks anything of the audience.

Hey, everyone has nights like that.