Sam Bell (Rockwell) is a lunar mining engineer coming to the end of a three-year stint overseeing mineral extraction on the dark side of the moon.

Affable and level-headed, he's had to make do with the company of Kevin Spacey's super-computer (think a kindlier HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey) until he makes the trip home to be reunited with his wife and daughter.

For the last thirty-six months, he's had to stoically make do with the odd replay of an old stuttering video link as his sole means of contact with them…but that's about to come to an end.

And then disaster strikes. While on a routine inspection run-out on a moon buggy, the vehicle sideswipes the vast extraction machine and he lands in a ditch with a sickening thud.

To reveal anymore would critically undermine this beautifully-crafted sci-fi poser, an endearing and ultimately touching thriller-cum-drama which echoes the 1972 deep space classic Silent Running.

Rockwell is pitch perfect as the dutiful engineer, his sanity kept in place with the sure knowledge that he will soon be returning to Earth and the welcoming bosom of his young family.

Jones' touch is light - weightless, you could say -  as he sets the scene -  a humdrum timetable of duties in the scruffy lunar base, eerily reminiscent of the sort of place inhabited by TV's Space 1999, 

He is equally up the task when events take a darker hue and he is called upon to supply believable motivation for the sequence of events knocking Sam's hopes of a safe return to earth out of orbit.

Dad, who memorably played an alien in Nic Roeg's Man Who Fell To Earth, will be proud. And rightly so.

Tim Evans