Moon

The DVD extra showing the Q&A session at Sundance for Moon (2009), a standard PR exercise, shows David Jones' son to be an unaffected British bloke. Nice surprise for any moviegoer who knows that Duncan (aka Zowie in his youth) Jones, whose mother was an American model, was the 21-year-old best man for his dad's second wedding, in 1992. That's when David Bowie married supermodel Iman.

The generational links are truly spacious. Moon tells the story of an astronaut nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone at a chemical plant on the moon. Every elderly rock fan knows how much and how long Bowie used space as a musical and personality motif.

As the Sundance chat-fest indicates, multi-millionaire Bowie rightly didn't back his son's first feature film. Instead, Sting's wife says her production company stepped in to raise completion funds. But it looks (from the producer's family name and Jones' dedication) as if Bowie did support his son's 28-minute short film, Whistle (2002). It's a technically accomplished 2002 fable about a Switzerland-based British hit-man who uses hi-tech gadgetry to kill via bombs projected through space. Admirably, it's included in the Moon DVD.

Whistle may have been Jones's open sesame to the London Film School. Returning from uni in the States, he also worked in advertising, gaining useful notoriety for his lesbian-tinged work for FCUK. Like Christopher Nolan, he's an indie talent happily moving into the mainstream; one of his current projects is a Hollywood scifi epic, Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Moon may also be the movie that finally pushes Sam Rockwell into a stardom to match that of Robert Downey Jr rather than Christopher Walken. Rockwell, playing Sam the lonely astronaut, has earned a shelf of acting awards for it, adding to his long record of indie triumphs (Lawn Dogs, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Matchstick Men). Like Jones, parental divorce left him in a father's care, but there's no other clue to Jones's Q&A statement that the movie developed out of Rockwell and him talking over production ideas.

The only other meaningful role in the movie is that of a voice, Kevin Spacey's, playing the onboard computer, GERTY. Programmed to guard and guide Sam, the machine plays an increasingly crucial cog in the scenario. (As always, I regret the need for movies to give front-credits to casting directors, especially when one veteran and his assistant get those credits for maybe helping the production team find this movie's handful of blurry-faced tiny-bit parts.)

Jones assembled a good technical crew, and they created a worthy tribute to scifi classics (they reference Silent Running and Alien 1 as much as the 2001 that led to them). The script is crisp (and its blend of portent and humour is delivered with controlling charisma by Rockwell and Spacey). The moon-raking scale models and spaceship studio sets have an old-fashioned air without being cheesy. The effective musical soundtrack is rare and rarely noticeable, and Jones's pacing develops a dramatic tension culminating in a quickfire succession of final twists.