Moon

Duncan Jones's Moon opened in 2009 and was nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. The film was Jones's directorial debut after a career as a music-video and commercials director; he is the son of David Bowie. The film was made on a budget of approximately $5 million and consolidated Jones as one of the most distinctive contemporary British genre directors. Sam Rockwell, in the central solo lead, anchors the entire film.

With his three-year contract on a Helium-3 lunar mining station nearly up, astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is alone on the moon's far side with only the station's monotone-voiced AI named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company. The Lunar Industries corporation has assured Sam that his return to Earth and reunion with his wife and small daughter is approaching. As small things begin to behave strangely on the station, Sam begins to question his own physical condition and the broader assumptions of his contract.

The film operates as restrained science-fiction in the lineage of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Silent Running, with substantial use of practical-model lunar-station effects (Bill Pearson, the original Alien model maker) and Clint Mansell's distinctive score. The film's reception was modest commercially but increasingly distinguished critically, with Jones's subsequent work (Source Code, Mute) extending the broader genre register he had established here. Rockwell's central performance is widely cited as one of the most committed solo lead performances in recent British cinema.