Movie Review: Apollo 18
OMG Scary!
Look, I’m about to reveal that I must be some kind of amateur or idiot. Every review I have seen on this film has panned it as unoriginal and lacking tension. While I concede the unoriginal claim (it is the bastard three way love child of Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project, and Alien) I found it scary as hell. (Alien image courtesy of the science fiction t shirt category)
Maybe it’s because I love astronauts, and understand how dangerous what they do really is. Like most guys my age when I was a kid I wanted to be one, and used to get up early to watch the space shuttles launch (until the Challenger blew up. That was a pretty crappy day in a childhood full of crappy days). I also have a good understanding of the dangers of just walking on the moon. You don’t need a creature to die a horrible death out there.
Anyway, maybe I am an idiot and should not be doing reviews, but I will not be dishonest and to be truthful, this movie had me hunched over gripping the arm rests.
It’s 1974 and after NASA announces the scrubbing of Apollo’s 18, 19, and 20 they secretly launch 18 in order to do some kind of secret DoD mission. The entirety of the movie is filmed on home movie super 8 and/or onboard mission recorders. Three guys are sent up with orders to set some kind of secret tracking devices up around the South Pole of the moon. The two guys in the lander land and start working. Weird crap starts happening. They find footprints that they follow back to a Russian lander, and they find the Russian Cosmonaut dead and desiccated. Rock samples keep moving around. You catch a glimpse of weird movement. Alien creature sneak around, and all hell breaks loose.
I don’t want to get to far into the story, as I don’t think a lot of people will actually want to read this review, but I will say the filming effects added a lot to the overall experience. They really made it look like some found footage. Basically everything blows up.
Anyway, the stars. Scary. Two stars. They really made everything as authentic as possible. One star. Good acting. One star. Good camera work. One star. They never really show you a good view of the creatures, and that actually adds a lot to the movie. One star. Astronauts. One star. Decent filming and CGI (although watching this film you gain an understanding of how some people can claim the whole moon landing was a farce cooked up in a film studio). One star. The story made sense, as far as such thing can go. One star. Totol: nine stars.
The black holes. Extremely predictable (when you see a Soviet lander and they determine it has oxygen and fuel it doesn’t exactly strain your brain to figure out that they will be escaping aboard it). One black hole. Sound effects in space (a pet peeve of mine). One black hole. The action was obviously at Moon’s 1/3rd Earth gravity when they were outside the lander but seemed to revert to full Earth normal whenever they were inside the lander on the moon (stuff still falls slower, guys). One black hole. The two astronauts pretty much fell into every bad horror cliche available, starting with the “we just found an abandoned moon lander (farmhouse, amusement park, hospital, campsite) exactly like ours, except the inside is covered with a lot more blood. Instead of bugging the hell out let’s look for more stuff to kill us” thing. One black hole. While the set and everything was as authentic as possible, there were a bunch of dopey technical glitches that bugged me, mostly have to do with the physics of matching orbits with no calculation done whatsoever. One black hole. One of the astronaut, with no training really and no sign of any ability to read Cyrillic, manages to figure out how to operated a Soviet space craft in about two minutes. One black hole.
I would like to mention that most of the other reviews I read had issues with the pacing and found it boring, but I actually didn’t mind. It seemed appropriate for a movie set on the moon to move at a measured pace, and I found the tension buildup to be pretty good.
So a final score of three stars. Not particularly good, but not bad either. I can see a lot of the points the other reviewers raised, but I did indeed find it scary. I’d like to see this movie do OK, but it looks like it has already tanked. Too bad. NetFlix it I guess. You shouldn’t have to wait long.
