Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astro-miner who runs a lunar energy mining outpost all by his lonesome in Moon.

Sony Pictures Classics

Moon is a low-budget, paranoid sci-fi thriller that gives up its paranoia and mystery far too early. It’s one of those indie films whose selling point is “look what they made with very little money.” Because what “they” — director Duncan Jones and the British production team — pulled off is an eye-poppingly real lunar base that, if nothing else, looks messy and lived-in.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astro-miner who runs a lunar energy mining outpost all by his lonesome. He’s on the far side of the moon, away from the sun, operating, by remote control, strip-mining “harvesters” named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Occasionally, he ventures out in a cute rover vehicle that looks like a slicker version of the toy-sized models from such British TV shows of the ’70s as Space: 1999.

Communication with the home office, or just “home,” where his wife and kid live, is unsatisfying and time-delayed. Sam’s only conversation companion is a robot — GERTY 3000, soothingly voiced by Kevin Spacey in a way that recalls the computer HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Sam, is everything OK? You don’t seem like yourself today,” GERTY says.

This isolation from human interaction and life on Earth is weighing on Sam, who finds that old Mary Tyler Moore re-runs aren’t enough to keep him sane. He’s seeing things — people who aren’t there. That leads to an accident that sparks the ultimate hallucination — another Sam.

But is this fellow who looks like him and argues with him really just a figment of his stir-crazy imagination? What are the other possibilities?

Screenwriter Nathan Parker and director Jones, a relatively inexperienced filmmaker with David Bowie for a dad, know their sci-fi history. Moon owes much — almost too much — to 2001.

Rockwell might be expected to have a little more fun with this “twins” performance. He instead plays his two Sams straight — depressed, worried, angry, fearful. The best joke in a movie that could use a little more wit is the song Sam wakes up to each day — that early ’90s pop hit “I Am the One and Only.”

Sci-fi fans will relish the 2001 connections and the utterly convincing reality the filmmakers have created here.

But for a “paranoid thriller” to work, the paranoia has to rise

and rise until a climax at the finale, not give away the game halfway in.

***

Starring: Sam Rockwell, voice of Kevin Spacey

Rated: R, contains profanity.