Apollo 18 (2011)

By now, the basic style conceit of Apollo 18 is familiar to most moviegoers. Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity before it, the film is presented as “found footage” of a real-life horror. This time around, the mock-doc takes us to the moon, specifically a secret 12th moon landing. According to the trailers, what they find there is the reason we never went back.

Apollo 18 skips right over opening credits and gets straight to the purported home video and NASA surveillance footage. Through these grainy 16mm images, we watch a team of three astronauts head where only 12 others have gone before. While pilot John Grey (Ryan Robins, uncredited) orbits the cratered rock, astronauts Nathan Walker and Benjamin Anderson (Lloyd Owens and Warren Christie, also uncredited)touch down on the surface to install a series of cameras. It is 1974–in the midst of the Cold War–and the cameras, they have been told, are meant to spy on the Russians back home on terra firma. But that isn’t what happens.

Instead, they discover the relics of a Russian moon module that isn’t supposed to be there, as well as the remains of its cosmonaut. Then, unexplained bumps and creaks in the night (it’s always night where they are) lead to one astronaut coming down with a strange infection. As the story builds, the astronauts learn that they are not alone.

Directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego from a script by Brian Miller and Cory Goodman, Apollo 18 clearly understands the genre that it is working in. It gives us a legitimate reason why there are cameras constantly recording everywhere that our main characters take us. And aside from some intrigue about the cause of the strange happenings (is it a missing Russian cosmonaut, somehow still alive on the surface, or is it something alien), the film skips over the usual Hollywood third-act twists and turns. Still, the acting by television veterans Owens and Christie is solid, and there’s more than one effective jump-out-of your-seat moment.

Although nothing scary happens in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film, these early scenes are an accurate re-creation of vintage moonwalk footage, right down to the skillfully executed space suit costumes. Moreover, seeing the Earth reflected in the astronaut’s shaded visors is a sight for the sore eyes of all of us living in a post-NASA world. I do wonder if this film’srelease–moved from March 2011 to January 2012 and back–was timed to take advantage of the end of the US space shuttle program. If so, it’s a well-played move by its producers and studio execs.

When the action does take off, Lopez-Gallego employs the now-usual bag of tricks–jump cuts, shaky cameras, and static interruption, among them–to keep you squinting and trying to see what’s yet to be shown. Ultimately, he shows very little. Some audience members will be frustrated with the less-than-fleshed-out extraterrestrials (hint: they’re not flesh at all), but those who like a healthy dose of science with their fiction will appreciate that the moon’s inhabitants are not carbon-based. I think showing only flashes of the enemy was a shrewd choice given the film’s small budget (not as small as Paranormal’s $15,000, I’m sure). Better rarely seen aliens than crappy ones, I always say.

Getting these details right is important because it makes it easier to get past certain harder-to-swallow conceits. Like how does a Saturn rocket take off without anyone noticing? I know there was no YouTube or Twitter back then, but seriously? Oh yeah, and how the heck did all of this footage–including some handheld home video–make it back to Earth? There are other soft spots in the writing of Apollo 18. For example, one astronaut urges the other to save himself because “they only want me.” Now how on the moon would he know that? And the ending, which I won’t spoil here, smacks a little of that story you wrote in the eighth grade but couldn’t decide how to finish, so you made everything blow up.

If your scientific mind can let go for a while, you’ll find Apollo 18 reasonably entertaining. I’ll admit, however, that it doesn’t match the fear and vulnerability factor of Paranormal Activity. But it does make you wonder. Why didn’t we ever go back?