Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott, Kaya Scodelario, Benedict Wong, Matt Berry, and Malcolm Stewart also star.

After an oil crisis, Lunar Industries makes a fortune by building Sarang Station, a facility on far side of the Moon to mine the alternative fuel helium-3.

He overhears GERTY, an artificial intelligence which assists him, having a live chat with Lunar Industries management, despite the apparent communications failure.

The two Sams search the area, finding a communications substation beyond the facility's perimeter which has been interfering with the live feed from Earth.

GERTY helps the older Sam access the recorded logs of past clones, who all fell ill as their contract expired.

The rescue team is fooled after finding both a newly-awakened clone in the medical bay and the corpse of the older Sam inside the crashed rover.

[10][11][12] Jones described his interest in the lunar setting: [We] wanted to create something which felt comfortable within that canon of those science fiction films from the sort of late seventies to early eighties.

It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don't know that much about it.The director described the lack of romance in the Moon as a location, citing images from the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE: "It's the desolation and emptiness of it ... it looks like some strange ball of clay in blackness.

Jones made reference to the photography book Full Moon by Michael Light in designing the look of the film.

[13] Spacey's vocal portrayal of GERTY was heavily influenced by HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), voiced by Douglas Rain.

[13] To save further on production costs, Jones re-used several set pieces from an abandoned movie based on the BBC TV sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf.

[21] Sony Pictures Classics distributed the film in the United States,[22] beginning with a limited release in cinemas in New York and Los Angeles on 12 June.

The website's consensus reads: "Boosted by Sam Rockwell's intense performance, Moon is a compelling work of science-fiction, and a promising debut from director Duncan Jones.

"[28] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 67 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Byrge also believed that cinematographer Gary Shaw's work and composer Clint Mansell's music intensified the drama.

Byrge wrote: "Nonetheless, 'Moon' is darkened by its own excellencies: The white, claustrophobic look is apt and moody, but a lack of physical action enervates the story thrust."

The critic felt mixed about the star's performance, describing him as "adept at limning his character's dissolution" but finding that he did not have "the audacious, dominant edge" for the major confrontation at the end of the film.

[31] Roger Ebert, giving the film three and a half stars out of four, wrote: Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital.

[33] Rolling Stone magazine ranked the film at number 23 on their Top 40 Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century, finding that "Duncan Jones' debut feature keeps you wondering whether its hero – played by an on-point Sam Rockwell – is losing a battle with what appears to be his "double" or if he, is, in fact, losing his mind [...] this sci-fi indie does a helluva lot with very, very little".

[34] Digital Spy said it was an "incredible low-budget science fiction movie", opining that Jones' direction of the film "brilliantly explores ideas of identity while mixing in some practical VFX spectacle to boot.

[35] A. O. Scott, chief film critic for The New York Times wrote that Jones directing "demonstrates impressive technical command, infusing a sparse narrative and a small, enclosed space with a surprising density of moods and ideas".

Scott said that like most of science fiction, the film "is a meditation on the conflict between the streamlining tendencies of technological progress and the stubborn persistence of feelings and desires that can't be tamed by utilitarian imperatives", while also asserting that "the film's ideas are interesting, but don't feel entirely worked out [...]the smallness of this movie is decidedly a virtue, but also, in the end, something of a limitation".

In the film, on a TV broadcast of a court trial, Sam Bell and several of his clones are all seen in the courtroom, identifying themselves in an "I'm Spartacus" allusion.