Apollo 18
Apollo 18
Rating: 
Movie: Apollo 18 (2011)
Studio : Dimension Films
Info : Click Here
Runtime : 87 min
Website : apollo18movie.net
Rating : PG-13
Trailer : 
Review:
Two astronauts (Warren Christie and Lloyd Owen) are sent on a secret mission to the moon to determine why NASA had deemed the lunar surface unsafe and cancelled all future missions. In the real world, this was due to funding issues which shut down the program in 1972, but this revisionist look at the space program shows that there was something far more sinister afoot than a lack of coin. And the Department of Defense wanted to know what it was. The filmmakers then supposedly found 80 hours of footage, which was classified but leaked out for the world to know in what I guess is a shout out to Wikileaks.
The company releasing this film has gone through some great lengths to pretend that this is actual footage of a real life event that was hidden away from the public. Even the two stars of the film are listed with no credit in the Internet Movie Database. It contends that they are not real actors at all, but real astronauts that had to endure their terrible journey. To me, what the producers are trying to do just insults the movie going audience’s intelligence. This isn’t like Area 51 where things happened on a secret base somewhere that no outsider could get to. This is space we are talking about. And to get to space is not just a hop into your personal spacecraft and off you go. Rockets being hauled out onto the pad and the days of preparations can not be done in shadow. As someone who lived close to Cape Canaveral, any launch is big news and would have been back in 1973, when the space race was in full force. At the very least, people would have remembered it. If you are going to push the conspiracy idea, it works better if the facts are at least somewhat believable. This footage gimmick may have worked in Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, but only because people could relate to not knowing what goes on inside every house or deep in the dark woods. Finding a tape would be almost believable. But using low budget camera tricks and pawning it off as some sort of real footage is stupid.
But in all fairness, that really doesn’t have anything to do with the movie itself except that it sets the tone of the film from the very start with the opening written narration. From there, the story plays in three acts using what looks like 40 year old video tape. It’s grainy. It flickers out a lot, having been supposedly damaged over time, and has that hand held queasiness factor that is only kept in check by some still camera work such as when they are in the capsule. This can get a bit annoying after a bit, but thankfully the shorter running time doesn’t make it too much of a strain on the eyes and in some parts these low budget visual effects actually work in the movie’s favor. At the very least, they do make you feel as though this is the 1970’s you are watching, thankfully without the leisure suits.
The story is far more character driven than other entries into the hand held thriller genre. There is a great dynamic between the two men as the danger gets more and more real. And their fear comes across very well. The close quarters, what lies outside, are all phobias that can be attributed to the human condition and the movie plays on that. It also does well delving in the conspiracy theory that the movie tries to imply. My only minor fault here is that a little more information about what happened prior would have been helpful in understanding and relating to their predicament. We don’t know anything about them and why they are there.
If this was a pseudo documentary into a false conspiracy, it might have been okay, but this being billed as a horror movie. So it has to be reviewed as one. And in this case, it failed pretty badly on the scare factor. Like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark that we just reviewed, it relies on suspense to fuel the few gotcha moments in the film. But it does not do this successfully. While there are some pretty disturbing moments, the anxiety is never really that heightened that the jumps are off the chart. And once we see the enemy, the film becomes even more anti-climatic. The trailer promised that the last 10 minutes would go down in movie history. Not sure what history they were referring to. The end doesn’t seem to justify the journey making one walk out of the theater really scratching their heads. I guess the sequel will help.
For a low budget film, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego did his best to try to stretch every dollar and there are parts that are better than some big budget action movies, especially in the acting, but it wasn’t enough to pull the film out of mediocrity. I give this film a 3.2/5, a little better than some, but not able to scare, which was the point.
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