Exciting concept, well-made low-budget but a bit naive

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2014)

The premise is great, the acting, directing and set decoration are excellent, but I personally found that Moon lacked some edge. The big flaw here is that Gerty the robot is too much benevolent and tractable to create tension. Maybe Kubrick set too high a standard with HAL-9000, then Tarkovski introduced too much intellectualized poetry before Spielberg capped it all with his heavy sentimentalism. Unfortunately Duncan Jones seems more at ease with these two than with Kubrick's inescapable noir vision.
Moon feels more like these naive "flower power" SF movies of the seventies (Logan's Run, Silent Running) than like a sharp homage to 2001. Even Saturn 3, despite its flaws, is way more edgier.
In the end it's OK because it is so well done, but it could have been much better with a script polish delivering a better suspense with increasingly more actual danger for the hero.