The Atari 2600 had some gloriously batshit titles. For example, there was Communist Mutants from Outer Space, which is actually an incredibly solid game, almost in spite of the silly name.
2011 found footage sci-fi horror film Apollo 18, has aliens that can disguise themselves as rocks destroy our flag. And this is near a crater where it turns out the Russkis secretly place their own lander; ergo, potentially community mutants are in outer space. This is a pretty stupid movie, in spite of an interesting premise.
The idea is there was one additional, secret mission after 17. This one was supposedly top-secret, and entirely for the Department of Defense, so just know it’s going to go well, with the top priority being the successful return of the crew. *cough*
The two astronauts in the lander set up a flag and transmitters. They also set up cameras, as has been done since Apollo 11. As indicated by the text at the bottom of the image from one such camera, these devices are also motion detecting, which I think would raise some suspicions.
In addition to finding the Russian lander, they find the deceased Cosmonaut. There is a suspicious cut in his spacesuit, and the helmet had a hole and large cracks in the glass. What killed him will be revealed to be spider-line things that disguise themselves as rocks. Those things are shoddy CGI but, even if they have been rendered completely realistically, I still would have found the concept too laughable for me to believe.
The moon critters, as I believe they should be dubbed, slice into spacesuits and then into the person inside it. This leaves a nasty infection, apparently because of moon germs. I seriously doubted that was a possibility, and assume somebody was just influenced by the Joe Farrell jazz album Moon Germs, which has an awesomely freaky cover, by the way. Also, as the moon has only the most tenuous of atmospheres, wouldn’t that person be dead almost immediately after the suit is compromised?
As I mentioned earlier, this is in the found footage style. Filmmakers tend to regard that as an opportunity for a cheap and relatively easy way to make a feature film. Critics seem to largely consider the genre to be a lazy way to make a movie, and to justify poor performances.
This picture puts the lie to all those assumptions. Once again, it appears acting naturally is the most difficult kind of acting. From the first scene, where an astronaut is being interviewed on camera, I didn’t buy any of the performances. And these guys are playing astronauts. Have you ever noticed how, despite their accomplishments, that group tends to not have the most dynamic personalities? Kubrick seemed to clue in on that in his direction of the actors in 2001, where an on-board computer has ore personality than them.
As for found footage being an inexpensive approach to movie-making, I was baffled by the 10 minutes of closing credits. Even with slow this text crawl goes by, the runtime couldn’t cross the 90 minute threshold. I didn’t pay them much attention, but I suspect the most people worked on CGI, yet the results aren’t remarkable.
I also had significant issues with the nature of the “found” footage here. Every second of it has to ring as true for the production to be successful. It should stand up to scrutiny as to how the footage you’re seeing was gathered, and how we are seeing that now. Since much of what we see was captured on film, that means it had to get back from there to here. Also, to have adequate coverage for the movie, there need to be many cameras and, damn, did they ever bring a ton of them along. I was surprised there was still room for the crew in the lander. And there’s a couple of instances of the obligatory, “We need to record this for the record” statements, as if that is adequate explanation for everything little thing being captured on film.
There are problems from the very beginning. I didn’t believe the performers as the astronauts in their individual interviews. If this was supposed to be a top-secret mission, it doesn’t make much sense for them to have there to be the typical interviews and footage of mission preparation that were produced for the previous missions, as that material was meant to be publicity. This mission wouldn’t have any publicity, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason to even preserve it for posterity. As the first man to set onto the lunar surface on this mission says, “I prepared a speech, but nobody would hear it anyway.”
The one thing I can give credit for is a couple of decent jump scares. One of these has a good setup, where one astronaut goes into a cave, using only a what is essentially a flash bulb for light. The result is akin to trying to go into a completely dark space with only an old flash camera to see your way. All we can see are the briefest glimpses of small areas of the space.
The Russian project amused me in a couple of ways. One, their lander is like if somebody took the standard Apollo lander and did a slightly steampunk spin on it, as if Jules Verne was their mission commander. Also, I found it preposterous they were still monitoring communications their long-defunct lander, and yet they immediately respond to a distress signal.
I first saw Apollo 18 in a theatre in its original run. I remember being unimpressed, but don’t recall it being as god-awful stupid as I found it this time around. For those who are still curious, I ask that you keep two considerations in mind. First, remember this footage had to somehow come back to Earth. Second, what did the moon critters eat before we came along?
Dir: Gonzalo López-Gallego
Starring Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen, Ryan Robbins
Watched on Kanopy