That said, I do not disbelieve claims that he is ingenuous, guileless, unpretentious, ambitious, or talented; I do not believe that The Tree of Life is a bad movie; but I also do not believe its Creator is infallible. First off, there’s a reason this film invites such anvils of praise as “confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.” His “art” is writ so large it can be seen from space: and, indeed, he chucks us at the second star to his right, and goes straight on till the first-ever morning. In case you haven’t heard, Malick follows his opening shots of grown-up Jack (Sean Penn) daydreaming in a Dallas office, during the present day, with the reactions of Jack’s parents to his brother’s death, circa the 1960s—the cause of death is undisclosed, though Malick had a younger brother who is said to have taken his own life in 1968—and then the director hops back a bit further: to the Big Bang. The ensuing light show was designed in part by Douglas Trumbull, who, as a young man, went Beyond the Infinite with Kubrick in 2001. It’s a striking montage: Like the waves breaking on themselves in Jack’s memory, there’s an ebb and flow to the cosmic matter and, later, the lava, churning out civilization’s lifeblood. It’s an illustration of time. But it doesn’t have an inch more depth than Duncan Jones’s essay on ephemerality, scrawled in editing, in Source Code. This sequence was intended for another film—one that Malick never got around to making. It shows.

What follows, for quite awhile, is equally blunt “art,” although some of the images and gestures lodge in your mind like morsels of food lodge in your teeth. Though set in Texas, where Malick grew up, it never seems very hot; for the interiors, it’s as if the curtains veiled a full moon that’s parked itself next door. The camera is a character, the buoyant head atop an invisible child’s shoulders. Essentially, The Tree of Life is a portrait of the artist as a sensitive kid; and young Jack (Hunter McCracken, fantastic) isn’t much different than other sensitive kids. The O’Brien family is mildly dysfunctional—a headache rather than a heart attack—with a childlike Earth-mother (ginger-haired Jessica Chastain), representing “grace,” and a melancholic tough-guy dad (Brad Pitt), representing “nature,” as the two poles between which Jack is torn. And though it could be said that this lengthy midsection, by way of the director’s impressionistic editing, is true to the processes of memory, it struck me as a best-of reel of every early memory Malick ever wanted to sanctify on film; and it’s sanctified, all right, by the Mahler and the Brahms that exult in the imagery. But it’s like a Hallmark card written by someone with direly serious literary ambitions: The story doesn’t live up to the style, whether you call it a story or not. (Though the story does catch up eventually.) Malick’s camera gapes at adults as if they were skyscrapers, and skyscrapers as if they were adults; this glabrous equipoise is genuinely childlike. But when exaltation is the default mode, each scene—each memory—carries the same weight as the last. The style says: Everything is beautiful. Which is to say, it says nothing.

Movies like Sucker Punch are suffocating because there’s no fresh air in them, just an accretion of pop-cultural dust; but this film, set in ’50s suburbia—Malick was born in 1943—and yet devoid of any such buildup, seems almost as phony. The O’Briens never went to movies? Never read a book or listened to a piece of music written after 1900? Didn’t even own a TV? It may be intended to represent the idealized American past; it’s an attempt at timelessness, which is an artist’s prerogative. But Jack is posited as a mid-century Huck Finn: an impossibility for almost any kid who wasn’t raised in Winter’s Bone. In Malick’s first feature, Badlands (1973), a touching study of preliterate romanticism, the killers tried to flee from society in a tree-house Neverland, but their paradise was inevitably lost. So why is Malick now applying that idyll to his own past? He once said of that film that he “tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. … I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would … take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.” His purposes in The Tree of Life may be different—the lovers on the lam in Badlands were older than Jack, but, fundamentally, they were children, too—but he’s lost his sense of irony. The very thing he once critiqued has now corrupted his memory; his critique has become his method. I don’t want to condemn the movie for going beyond the stranglehold of pop; Certified Copy functioned pretty well without it. But its absence here vexes me. (It seems almost as if he’s too good for the banal topicalities of life on Earth; but maybe I’m just being P.M.S.-y.) With the exception of Badlands and The Thin Red Line, Malick has stuck with pre-modern times; his style, responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring encounters ever on film, in The New World, is better off staying there.

The false start of the brother’s suicide is a mistake the movie never completely rectifies; since the character remains a veritable nonentity for most of the film’s duration, the event seems almost to have been exploited for poignancy. Malick’s use of a Biblical epigram, like his trademark sweet-nothings whispered in voiceover, are debatable effects—some get high on the incense he burns, even when I choke on it—but this psychological misstep cannot be swept under any impressionistic rug. The movie does improve, however, about two-thirds in, when the characters solidify as people; Malick displays a flair for drama that’s unprecedented in his oeuvre, and Brad Pitt explodes into life as a serious actor, bursting any expectations left over from his Benjamin Button or Jesse James. During the mnemonic rotogravure of the middle section, he’s stuck doing the strong-but-fair song-and-dance; but then, during a domestic dispute—the youngest son tells his ornery father to “be quiet”—Pitt shows the fairness that keeps O’Brien’s strength in check. He absorbs his wife’s blows—she’s frustrated, and knows she’s the real target of his animus—and then mollifies both her anger and his own, in something like a classical, tragic, deeply understanding embrace: one of the most poetic images in the movie. (Curiously enough, this stupendous bit of direction has been executed in rather traditional continuity editing.) The other standout, when Malick actually deals with Jack and his brother, lives up to the film’s ambitions; there’s heat, and tension, as history freezes for a moment before Jack betrays his brother’s trust—it isn’t a real pause in time, necessarily, but hesitation imposed by hindsight. And when we see the counterpoint, of the two boys embracing one another, wet with tears, no context is needed. Malick has beaded a string of memories here that doesn’t need to be chronological; the ordering device is a combination of nostalgia, love, and regret—the hazy sheath of childhood sufferance.

Those few scenes were almost enough to burn the twaddle out of my memory; it gives credence to the inscription on Malick’s cloak. (If one were to picture the director, instead, in my metaphorical sweatpants—well, a whole lot more would burn in one’s mind.) But I said that he both is and isn’t the man behind the curtain; the man who isn’t is the artist, and the man who is is the mystifier, a role he may take on unconsciously. I don’t think it’s the height of his aspirations that chafes me raw, but, rather, the blatant lack of perspective—the tendency to make a normal childhood, his own childhood, the stuff of a fairy tale, replete with the “magic” his apostles are so happy to supply. (Seeing everything as sacred is easy; being able to discern what is from the walloping mass of what isn’t is the task of an artist.) This poet, philosopher, recluse, Rhodes scholar is probably so deep that, beside him, I’m a kiddie pool. There is magic in his work, but there’s also crap—what others might refer to as “universal themes.” Is he expressing his love for, and descrying the divine in, the “ordinary” or merely the conventional, the archetypal? Is he expressing the abstract irrefutabilities espied in his work by the literati or is he just luring them down the primrose path of thought experimentation? (Maybe, one could counter, inspiring such examination is a virtue in itself; reading some of the critics who sing Malick’s body electric is as, or more, edifying than watching his film.) He asks the BIG questions, but doesn’t always frame them—just draws attention to the fact that he’s asking them. Beauty plus benignity equals A-R-T of the first degree. No wonder it only happens about five times every 40 years! God should thank Himself, however, that Malick sometimes remembers where He really is: in the details.

A pair of U.S. Marshals—Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo)—disembark a mist-shrouded ferry and set foot on Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum-security prison in the Massachusetts Bay. One of the inmates—whom the chief psychologist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), refers to as “patients”—has gone missing. Rachel (Emily Mortimer) returns, inexplicably and without a scratch. As storm clouds converge on the island, Teddy becomes increasingly paranoid; its jagged shores are littorally inescapable. The authorities have ignored his; they’ve taken his gun, withheld paperwork, and worst of all, the whole shebang seems to be under the sway of a former Nazi (Max von Sydow). Another Rachel appears (a razor-sharp Patricia Clarkson); the House Un-American Activities Committee’s name is dropped (it’s the McCarthy era—1954); and Teddy suffers from migraines and oracular dreams: visions of his wife (Michelle Williams)—who was supposedly burnt to a crisp by an arsonist who happens to be committed on the island—alternate with the suffering children of Dachau, which Teddy helped liberate as a G.I.

This is a gothic storm of a movie, and it’s awash with melodramatic touches and nods to old films noir. Yes, the Bernard Herrmannian horns honk at you like traffic in Midtown Manhattan; and, yes, the investigators wear fedoras; and Teddy’s subordinate calls him “Boss”; and the shrinks speak in slippery platitudes while wearing tweeds; and the inmates jump out of dark corners and give you the willies. But all these touches add to the dense, painterly texture of the film. According to A.O. Scott, Scorsese “forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing … to pull out from under you.” I didn’t feel “forced,” but found the rug perfectly sewn; each thread can be stitched back together. (It’s a rare pleasure to have thrillers like this exercise one’s mental needle.) Salon compares Shutter Island to a film by David Lynch—but Lynch’s meanings don’t conform to a logical structure; this can be reconstructed in a manner that is absolutely, pellucidly, meticulously sane. Is it a work of depth and subtlety? Well—definitely not subtlety. But does that mean that Scorsese is, as David Edelstein asserts, “farther from reality than his hero is”? Formal perfection is always a little supernatural. At any rate, I prefer this maniacal professionalism—Scrosese’s 40-year endeavor to blend opera with genre filmmaking—to that of A Serious Man, which was a snub to anyone who tried to parse the Coens’ threads.

In a film this dense and dynamic, consistency can be both miraculous and conservative. When Scott—whose evaluation is uncharacteristically tsk-tsk-tsky—calls Shutter Island “airless,” I can understand why: There isn’t much breathing room. He and Edelstein, critics whom I admire, fall into rubrics a.) and c.). I can only offer, without risk of being called a spoilsport, part of why I’m still sympathetic to b.). Scorsese is no stranger to madness; his work has always been deliriant, and his oeuvre is spiked with psychopaths. Taxi Driver is one of the best character studies ever financed by Hollywood, and one of the most vertiginous downward spirals. But while you’re watching it, you know that cabbie is a little bit loopy. Watching Shutter Island, you may start to wonder about yourself. The third-act revelation may not be entirely original, but I was so caught up in the cobwebs of rationalization that it had the bite of a spider. (Perhaps some willful gullibility is required for the venom to take effect.) Shutter Island doesn’t connect to societal upheaval the way Taxi Driver and Mean Streets did; or celebrity culture the way The King of Comedy did; or the Patriot Act the way The Departed did. But it might prompt you to examine your own susceptibility to delusion; it might induce you to think like a madman.

When we first meet Teddy, DiCaprio’s Boston accent reminded me of those Red Sox window stickers with Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) pissing on the Yankees logo. In other words, he comes on a little strong. DiCaprio improves, however, when his anger downshifts to desperation. Ruffalo has a face that belongs in old movies; his swarthy, sympathetic visage lends itself to wounded trust. Kingsley and von Sydow never lose their composure in the sort of roles that the aging John Carradine once took on. Although he doesn’t have much screen time, Ted Levine plays the warden in such an impishly disarming way that he seemed to be a medieval demon tunneling his way inside Teddy’s bone marrow; he’s like a just-one-of-the-guys microcosm of Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. If he’s the devil on Teddy’s shoulder, Williams’s wife is the angel—and she’s a banshee of a femme fatale. With her flowing yellow hair, Williams has a soft, otherworldly, ambiguous presence; when she crumbles to dust, it seems in character.

Where does the c.) come in and mingle with the b.)? I think Elbert Ventura is on to something when he argues that Scorsese idolizes the studio-system “hacks” who made all sorts of popular genre pictures but squeezed in enough of themselves to form a watermark on the reels. This from a director whose intimate masterworks would have left John Ford or Howard Hawks scratching their heads; at the time, his style was like nails in their coffins. And yet, even then, their industrial style informed his personal vision. As far back as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Scorsese’s been showing off his prowess on their very own sets. Now that he’s finally landed as an “establishment” figure, his watermark is getting diluted in direct variation with the flood of money now being poured on him from the studios—or so the argument goes. But, on the count that Shutter Island is “impersonal … and a waste of time,” I disagree.

Maybe I didn’t feel the “insistent throb of a sensibility burning to get something out of [Scorsese’s] system,” but I felt that Shutter Island was more than a fanboy’s puzzle. It’s a plunge into a man’s moral breakdown—a coming to terms with the plaque that accumulates in a person’s soul—that’s not unfamiliar in the filmmaker’s work. But it was done in such a way that I’ve never before seen in his work. The wounds might have been inflicted by pop-psych stimuli, amplified and sensationalized enough to reach a mainstream audience (Laeta Kalogridis’s script is based on a bestseller by Dennis Mystic River Lehane); but the way Scorsese explores these feelings indicates a personal affinity with his subject, even if that subject is of less interest than those who’ve come before. I think it’s telling that some critics complain that this movie has delusions of grandeur while others believe it’s an impersonal pot boiler. Sure, at 67, Scorsese may be at low ebb; statistically speaking, his best days are probably behind him. But, as Ventura concedes, Scorsese’s low ebb is high tide for most blockbusters.

Tarantino’s Nazis surely get their due—either from the “Inglourious Basterds,” a brutal brigade of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt—giving a funny, good-trouper performance), or Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French Jew orphaned by the S.S. I’m sure Tarantino’s admirers, and young Jews like the Seth Rogen character who liked Munich because it showed the Chosen People finally kicking some ass, will approve of Inglourious Basterds’s dehumanization of Nazis. But wouldn’t they be offended that, for the eponymous squad of vengeful Semites, Tarantino has assembled a pitiful bunch that, save for the “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth), looks shlubby and undifferentiated? To top that off, the director has faithfully followed old-Hollywood convention by casting a glamourous star as their commanding officer: a Gentile good ol’ boy with better looks, better lines, and much more chutzpah than his men—men who fade into the background whenever he’s onscreen.

The Nazis are dehumanized, but so is everyone else: Tarantino converts his characters into little toy stereotypes, who, when wound up, amble down the quickest path toward bloodshed. The writer-director has an undeniable ear for dialogue, and he can make his characters sound like people—witty, ingratiating people, at that. But he betrays their human characteristics if it provides him an excuse to stage a clever set piece. Why else would Dreyfus (who looks like Uma Thurman) begin as a battered, sympathetic, movie-loving peasant girl, and end up glorified as a cold-hearted mass murderer with a shallow fixation on femme fatale glamour? Oh, that’s right. So Tarantino can squeeze in more movie references and squeeze out more blood. And the stiff-upper-lip Britisher (Michael Fassbender) who joins the Basterds, and reeks of suavity and finesse and noblesse oblige, is made a former film critic. Is the director trying to flatter me into giving him a good review? Nah. He’s probably just fanning the flames of his movie-trivia-drenched ego—massaging his fantasy self. Only a few minor characters—like the German father of a newborn—seem to have anything going on beneath a veneer of cool.

The true extent of Nazi horror is only touched on once, in the first scene of the movie. Colonel Hans Landa (the electrically chilling Austrian actor Christoph Waltz), the S.S.’s infamous “Jew Hunter,” manipulates a French farmer into admitting that he’s harboring “enemies of the state” beneath his floorboards. In the minutes that slowly tick away before the hidden Dreyfus family succumbs to German bullets, the scene is brilliantly written, directed, and acted. Waltz is so ingratiating, and yet you see glints of genuine evil in Landa’s cold eyes and back-slapping smooth talk. His is the evil of opportunism—you buy his rotten humanity, and shudder at the incongruity between his placid Aryan smile and the antisemitic propaganda he invokes, which you know he’s too smart for. Landa thinks his vision is clear because he sees through prejudices, which is why he, a “German hawk,” can think like a “Jewish rat.” But the analogy Tarantino feeds him is too clever; the writer outsmarts himself with his own fancy-pants epigrams. He does not follow through on what could be revealing screenwriting. Instead, he runs for cover as soon as the bullets fly, and shits on his own scene with a misplaced parody of spaghetti-Western music, capped off with a misplaced parody of The Searchers (1956) as Shosanna bolts out the door. The Searchers is famous for its maybe-he’s-racist-maybe-he’s-not portrayal of a Civil War veteran (John Wayne) who hunts down the Comanches that kidnapped his niece. Thematically, it’s relevant—but is an American director, who’s shallowly reducing World War II to Tom and the Jerries, really trying to draw a parallel between the Master Race and Manifest Destiny? He teases us with Pitt’s part-Indian Yankee called “Apache,” whose trademark is to scalp his Nazi son-bitch victims, but this is a clear case of mixing metaphors. A multifaceted artist could foreseeably make the comparison and have it be enlightening; Tarantino uses “deep” thoughts as mere decorations—flimsy trinkets that “prove” his own cleverness. They’re as hollow as Landa’s cold-hearted pleasantries.

Cleverness is what Inglourious Basterds is about. Cleverness and the barbaric pleasure of eye-for-an-eye revenge—the only drive that Tarantino’s painted-cardboard characters possess. Nazism is used as an aphrodisiac for this because it can be used for this; who’s going to come out and defend perpetrators of genocide? Tarantino’s art is in drawing attention to himself, but if one so much as thinks about what he says in his movies, one violates his grandiose vision—and, worse, is considered joyless or square. The director has it both ways: His keen sense of what’s politically correct (probably a defense against those who called him a racist for his movies’ liberal use of the  “‘N’ word”) makes his fictional avengers seem just; but, like Andy Warhol, Tarantino can hide behind chic, shallow amorality, as well. Then there’s that third layer: that he’s an artist, albeit a postmodern one who can pilfer as he pleases. And because he’s self-conscious, and because he does have talent and artistic flair, he can claim to be an alchemist who transforms scuzzy exploitation flicks into Oscar buzz. Hardcore fans of schlock vindicate themselves with him as its martyr. But despite having titillating artful touches that get it damn-near close, Inglourious Basterds is never elevated to art; it’s just exploitation inflated by money and self-importance.

There’s a movie-within-the-movie: a propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) that seems to be nothing more than shots of a Nazi sniper shooting and reverse shots of his anonymous victims histrionically dying. But when Tarantino cuts to mocking closeups of Hitler (Martin Wuttke) laughing at the carnage, you wonder, How’s that movie any different from Inglourious Basterds? We even see the fake film’s producer crying tears of self-admiration. Is Tarantino in any position to mock this?

Was I entertained by his movie? Yes. Is that all that matters? No. A good entertainer can make you pleased with facile things, even if there’s nothing in the attic and the basement is full of worms. In The Dark Knight, for example, Christopher Nolan’s smash-bang pacing kept one unaware of the suspicious subtext. Tarantino’s a smoother craftsman than Nolan, but more careless about what he says through his cartoon mouthpieces. He turns carelessness into a rancid personal style, a kind of spoiled-child anarchism. I don’t think he’s being false to his values or personal vision; he wants to give us what entertains him. But what entertains him could entertain a three-year-old. His is movie art for beginners because it’s movie art unabashedly reduced to the bare minimum needed to satisfy our collective pleasure principle. The hip ambiguities of Jackie Brown have degenerated into a wet-dreamworld that suffers from a pop-culture infestation and an antisocial hard-on for vengeance.

Since Tarantino’s self-infantilization is on par with the late Michael Jackson’s, his estimation of what gives his audience pleasure has become insultingly low. Yeah, we like sex and violence, and who hasn’t, at some point, been wronged and fantasized about a showy retaliation? It’s one thing to bring teenage daydreams—which often feed on the silly, evanescent movies that hormonally overwhelmed adolescents seek refuge in—to the screen, but Tarantino seems in denial about how silly his reveries were. Violence in movies doesn’t need to serve some social function, and I don’t think the average viewer is turning into a psychopath because of it. (S/he may be becoming desensitized to psychopathy, but that’s another story.) But violence in a great film serves a narrative purpose or follows a dramatic logic; it’s motivated. Violence for its own sake, as it is here, is masturbatory; violence motivates the plot. It’s lewd, neanderthal fun, if smartly, prettily executed—but that’s all, folks. Tarantino fails to show here that he grasps this, which makes him small potatoes. For all his talent, he seems dead-set on plateauing creatively; he resists the adult world like Peter Pan, but he’s aggressively lacking in innocence. His content is hedonistic and yet his style has become snobbish. Loving trash does not make one a vulgarian; aggrandizing trash does. Tarantino’s merger of simplifications and distortions with grandiloquent references and “personal touches” is enough to fill a garbage dump. At worst, it can make complicated issues like torture seem cut-and-dry.

Inglourious Basterds fulfills and exacerbates A.O. Scott’s dictum that movie marketing is handing arsenic lollipops to our inner children, but this film’s even guiltier than a Transformers 2 or Star Trek or G.I. Joe because we’re resigned to their big-franchise stupidity and opportunism. If there is a shred of genius in this film, it’s a wan, needling one; for me, it was like having my face shoved in dog shit and being forced to admit I enjoyed it. I didn’t react this way to Pulp Fiction, which was also a distillation of sorts. And I certainly didn’t react this way to Death Proof, which, at its best, turned reductivisim into concision; it had a dedication to craft that made it gleam like a vintage convertible, freshly waxed by its loving owner. It even seemed fascinated by real human lives, flubby though they were. But a movie like Inglourious Basterds can make you feel corrupt—and not in the way that moralists fear. Tarantino, despite his wrongheaded pretensions, has the energy requisite to make you feel that maybe this is all you need: a plateful of horny, violent dog shit. He celebrates, in earnest, the history and potential of cinema, and it amounts to—fuckin’ up Nazis. What a transcendent downer. Said energy is hard to distinguish from glitz and self-satisfaction, but it does amount to vision—grubby and complacent though it may be. Some day, perhaps, Tarantino will move beyond self-worship—which has been incorporated into his hero worship—take a step back, and see that good movies are more than the sum of their parts. But not with this film. Who’s an inglorious bastard? Someone who has massive artistic and financial power, and wastes it.

What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one! . . . Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.

The mostly pedestrian, occasionally enchanting, highly lucrative movies of this summer offer testimony to the success of that program. And the seasonal roster of winners and losers, as defined by box office tea-leaf readers, suggests some additional dividends. Toys, comic books, and familiar fictional characters are a bigger, more reliable draw than movie stars or well-known directors, and are also easier to control.

You can read the full thing here, if you’re hungry enough…

In the not-too-distant future, Earth’s “clean” energy is mined on the lunar surface. The mines require only one overseer, who’s secluded on our satellite for three years; communications to and from Earth must be prerecorded, so his only face-to-face companion is a mobile computer called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), whose operating system is half-HAL-9000 and half-WALL-E. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is finishing up his three-year contract as the movie opens. Homesick, he’s grown a grizzly beard and is surly with his programmed pal; he takes solace in videos from his family, and in making a paper model of his home town. But his reminisces get the best of him: He sees a mirage of his wife (Dominique McElligott) while driving in his lunar rover, and accidentally crashes into a giant thrasher. We then see Sam awakened by GERTY back on the station and forbidden to leave; but Sam seems to have an intuition, goes out to the thrasher, and discovers himself to be in the wreckage, as well.

If this passage seems a little hard to follow, it’s because there are now two Sams perambulating about the base. (If you don’t want to know why, you may not want to read on.) GERTY is invariably shady when the Sams question him about this, and, at first, the Sams can’t get much out of each other; they behave like one of the more unfortunate pairings forged through Craigslist. The “new” Sam thinks they’re both clones, and the old one concedes that their lives, memories, and destinies are all a sham; like the crew of the Nostromo in Alien, they are secondary to corporate directives. Eventually, they seek ways to return “home”—that is, to Earth—before a repair crew arrives at the base and discovers them both there. The Sams question their humanity and authenticity, but mature before our eyes. Like the vivacious replicants in Blade Runner, old Sam seems to be reaching his expiration date; new Sam starts out brutal and impatient, but learns to respect his fellow self.

Moon runs the old what-is-it-to-be-human jag, but does so at full gallop. Fancy bouts of pontification are disposed of without detriment to the movie; the screenwriter, Nathan Parker, keeps the dialogue ever fluid and never dripping with significance. Unlike cousin HAL, GERTY—by way of Spacey’s smarmy-smooth diction—is ultimately humane, but this revelation is never lingered on. The ambiguous little smiley faces that GERTY expresses himself with are enough to make the complexity of his “humanness” clear. But, despite such touches, which make this a shimmering crescent-moon of a picture, Jones’s conception hasn’t entirely waxed.

Moon was released a few weeks short of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, but its enthusiasm for space travel seems to have been jettisoned at takeoff. To my thinking, this broad pessimism is a tad regrettable; fortunately, it is not Jones’s focus. His eyes are more earthbound—toward people (or their equivalents), not planets. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with that viewpoint, it does make the movie seem limited in scope: Even when a feeling for cosmic wanderlust is absent, the cold beauty of outer space can be expressed no more vividly than on a wide silver screen. Someone once remarked to me that certain things are beautiful only when one is sad; in Moon, the loneliness and sorrow could be measured in light-years, but Gary Shaw’s cinematography looks clinical and cramped. It’s always adequate, and sometimes pretty, but never quite worthy of either the heavens above or Rockwell’s mere mortal below. Jones appears to be more of a humanist than Kubrick, but Kubrick’s command of the medium is, as yet, far greater than Jones’s. This shortcoming may seem superficial, but it has the potential to make Moon seem smaller than it is—and easily eclipsed.

But, despite some pictorial deficiencies, Jones’s direction is strong when the situation becomes tense, and his unusually judicious cutting (the film is only one hour and 37 minutes long) unleashes the fertile ideas poetically but efficiently; Moon’s lack of wonder may also be its lack of ponderousness. (In most movies of this sort, such as parts of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, wonder and ponderousness are entangled.) Jones’s ideas speak for themselves, and so do his actors—and the fact that there are so few of them makes Moon’s ability to hold our attention even more remarkable.

Like Michael Cera, Rockwell is an actor whose nervousness makes him likable and worth rooting for. But Rockwell’s tweakier than Cera. Both actors emote melancholy proficiently, but Cera’s (at this stage of his career) is always easily resolved. Rockwell’s antsiness is never resolved; his characters—such as the coked-up paranoiac in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, or half-wit brother of Robert Ford in the mythic Assassination of Jesse James, or impotent historian-activist in Frost/Nixon—never seem quite capable of taking care of themselves, and this makes one genuinely uneasy for him. Sam is no heroic Buzz Lightyear stationed on Moon; he’s scuzzy like the space truckers feasted on by Alien. But Rockwell gets to have it both ways, and pulls it off. He’s both the sickly, weary clone who’s collapsing like an addict in withdrawal and the fresh replacement who jogs, gets into fights, and needs Aviators when extracted from his synthetic womb. He’s playing the same man at different stages of a short life: It’s a compressed Benjamin Button stint, but achieved without the luxury of computerized makeup.

As A.O. Scott cleverly surmises, Jones “is no doubt tired of reading that his father is David Bowie,” but one can’t help but compare the introverted, fastidious elegance of Moon with the intergalactic intrigue of Ziggy Stardust. Both have their place. But Moon suggests “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Ray Bradbury’s Martian chronicle that told of domestic machinery going about its tasks long after an A-bomb wiped out those it had served. Bowie makes you want to visit outer space; Jones makes you happy you’re stuck on Earth.