The moon. What is it? Is it a planet? A vegetable? A giant ball of space lint? These are the questions that have haunted man for decades, if not centuries. Thankfully, Moon has landed in a handful of theaters around the country to answer these questions, and more.

In answer to the first question: it is not a planet. It is a lifeless rock. They don’t even have trees. Who knew?

Here’s another interesting thing about the moon that I learned from this movie: once you’re on it, it’s not very easy to get home, even in the future. This is what the movie is about, how hard it is to get home from the moon. We can all relate to this problem. Imagine you’re at the bar and you’re ten miles away from your house and you don’t want to drive home because you’re pretty drunk but it’s really your only option. Now imagine that you don’t have a car and there are 250,000 miles (I looked it up!) of brain-exploding space between you and home. And you’ve been at the bar for three years. By yourself and without any alcohol. Now you know how scary Moon is, which is very scary indeed.

At the beginning of the movie, we learn through a fake ad that in the future, the Earth will fix the whole energy thing because someone will discover that helium (?) can be harvested from the moon and be used to make all the energy we need, or something. Then we learn that the government only hires one person at a time to work a three-year stretch on the moon station, because that’s a great idea that could never possibly drive anyone crazy. This person is Sam Rockwell, and contrary to what you might assume from the set-up, he is totally going crazy. He has a wife and daughter at home, but he’s only able to communicate with them through YouTube videos, because the satellite is broken. Here’s some advice to anyone who wants to utilize video in a movie that’s set in the future: there is no reason to give your video the stuttering look that streaming video has right now. Because I can say with 99% accuracy that streaming video will have the kinks worked out fifty years from now. In fact, they will probably be worked out by the time Moon is released on DVD.

Here’s another bit of advice for people who make futuristic movies: in the future, no piece of technology will have a screen that looks like this.

That device is Sam Rockwell’s space friend, and it is voiced by Kevin Spacey channeling HAL from 2001. Why do computers in movies always sound like child molesters? I would think that if we had the technology to make a computer sound completely human, we probably would not give it Asperger’s Syndrome. Not that people with Asperger’s Syndrome are child molestors. I’m just saying. If I were ever stuck on the moon for three years, I would request that my space friend sound like Gallagher.

So one day Sam Rockwell is out in his space car looking at some rock-breaking machine that we’re supposed to intuitively understand and care about, and he sees a weird lady who shouldn’t be walking around because also moon fact #3: people can’t breath on the moon. And he freaks out and plows into the side of the rock-breaker. Next thing we know, he wakes up back on his spaceship, good as new. Then Rockwell spends the next ten minutes arguing with the Kevin Spacey Moon Machine about how he wants to go out and look at the rock-breaker but Spacey doesn’t think it’s a good idea because Rockwell might still be sick from getting in an accident. Then Rockwell tricks the Moon Machine into letting him go out and look at the rock-breaker by busting some hose in the spaceship when the Moon Machine isn’t looking (?) When he gets to the rock-breaker, he is surprised to see that a space car has crashed into it, and the driver of the space car is … another Sam Rockwell. (Note: this is in the trailer, so I am not spoiling anything. I wish it hadn’t been in the trailer, because it was the only real surprise in the movie. But I guess I never would have gone to see it if I thought there was only one Sam Rockwell in it. Nice job, trailer!) If you are confused by this part, it’s okay, I was confused too. Everything eventually comes to make sense, but not in that satisfying way where you feel like you have been manipulated by a clever filmmaker. More in that way where you just have to patch the script’s holes with your imagination.

The next half hour is spent watching Sam Rockwell talk to Sam Rockwell and trying to figure out why there are two of him. This is where the film’s problems set in. Because the question is answered relatively quickly, and then we spend the rest of the movie learning that, yes, this is the correct answer, all right. From the previews, it looks like this movie is going to follow the classic sci-fi mind-fuck plot in which we try to determine whether or not what’s happening is actually happening. But as far as I could tell, everything that happened actually happened, at least according to the logic of the film.

And maybe that’s to the movie’s credit. I generally hate movies that make us question whether the events depicted within them are real, because if they aren’t real, then why are we watching them? You have to be a smart filmmaker to pull off that kind of plot. I guess I was secretly hoping that this was going to be one of those rare smart filmmaker movies. But it’s not. It’s a good old regular filmmaker movie gussied up to look like it’s smart.

Moon is directed by Duncan Jones, who is David Bowie’s son from his first marriage to Iggy Pop. He claims that his real name was never Zowie Bowie, but we all know that was a question in the original Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit, so nice try, Jones. But, whatever, you gotta give him credit for not trying to cash in on name recognition, even though clearly he would never be entrusted to direct a movie of any size if he was not the son of David Bowie. But he does a capable job, and I could see him doing better things in the future.

One thing’s for sure: Sam Rockwell is the king. He Hayley Mills the shit out of this film for real. Clearly, Jones is smart enough to know that the only person who can hang with Sam Rockwell on the moon is another Sam Rockwell. Anyone else would just get eaten alive.

On the Awkward Press scale of pizzas, Moon gets: 2 1/2 pizzas!