Directed by Roy Ward Baker and released just months after the Apollo 11 landing, Moon Zero Two envisions the year 2021 as a frontier era where the Moon has been tamed not by scientists, but by corporate interests and opportunists. The lunar surface is dotted with settlements like Moon City, which functions less like a laboratory and more like a high-tech Wild West town complete with saloons, transit hubs, and a heavy presence of "Space Corporation" bureaucracy. Earth is depicted as the distant, crowded metropole that has exported its capitalist vices—greed, corruption, and class divide—to the stars, leaving the Moon as a gritty industrial hub for mining and salvage operations.

The film’s societal dynamic is defined by the tension between individual explorers and monopolistic entities. Bill Kemp, the protagonist and a former Mars explorer, represents the discarded pioneer, now reduced to a freelance scavenger because deep-space exploration has been deemed too costly for the bottom line. This reflects a remarkably prescient "post-Apollo" cynicism, where the grand dreams of the 1960s are replaced by commercial passenger flights to Mars and Venus and the exploitation of lunar resources. The technology is a mix of grounded NASA-inspired designs, such as landers that closely resemble the Lunar Module, and fantastical elements like artificial gravity and laser-based law enforcement.

While Moon Zero Two failed to predict the technological miniaturization of the 21st century—relying instead on 1960s-style switches and "groovy" aesthetics—it was ahead of its time regarding space commercialization. The central plot involving the capture of an asteroid for its mineral wealth mirrors modern-day debates regarding asteroid mining and the legalities of celestial property. However, the film's timeline for permanent lunar colonization was significantly off; by the real 2021, humanity had not returned to the lunar surface in person for decades. Furthermore, its depiction of space combat and physics often prioritizes cinematic tropes over accuracy, such as the audible gunshots in a vacuum and the questionable logistics of crashing a sapphire asteroid into the lunar farside without catastrophic debris.