Why Moon feels quaintly out of date

Duncan Jones's 2009 sci-fi film, Moon, gives the recently anointed Sam Rockwell a chance to play three roles: 3 cloned versions of the protagonist, Sam Bell, who is finishing, or so it seems, a three-year stint on a lunar mining outpost. Inevitably, this film seen today will call out for comparisons w/ its most obvious antecendent (2001: Rockwell's only "partner" in his lunar expedition is an even-tempered computer servant w/ the voice of Kevin Spacey - this is already seeming like a horror movie! - reminiscent of Hal) and the more recent The Martian, about an astronaut mistakenly abandoned on the surface of Mars. Sadly, Moon comes up on the short end of these comparisons, primarily, I think, because it's a movie with a lot of weird technical twists and a very hard to follow plot sequence - including a lot of confusion that isn't well resolved about the time setting - the future? the present? the recent past? - (The protagonist watches 1980s TV to pass the time and all of the computer gadgetry looks weirdly out of date - but if the setting is 20 or so years ago, how come we don't know about these lunar outposts?) - but with no real development of character. (The Martian was all about human ingenuity, and 2001 was about the surprising, in its day, bond between man and machine.) In other words, it's a film that's all in the head and not in the heart, and that requires an extraordinary suspension of disbelief from the outset. There are a few clever twists, granted - we do get an answer, for ex., to the initial question that will trouble all viewers: Why is one guy left alone on the moon to run this entire operation? That said, Moon feels surprisingly quaint and out of date; maybe that's the point - with this 80s retro look and unglamourous lunar settings - it's about a mining expedition after all, not about experiments w/ life in orbit. (Additional note: DJ seems unaware of the meaning of the "dark side of the moon," where this film is set; all of the exterior scenes are filmed in darkness. Of course there is darkness on the dark side of the moon, but there is an = amount of daylight; The dark side of the moon is never exposed to Earth, but it is exposed half the time to the sun.)