Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/9/11
Everybody
loves a good conspiracy: reality is boring, and history tends to
move at the whim of the accountants more than sinister men in smoke-filled
rooms, which isn’t at all the way we’d prefer it to be. So we look
for the “real story” behind historic events with banal explanations, and
there are few more striking juxtapositions of the historic and the banal
than the 1970 decision to end the Apollo lunar landing program due to lack
of funds. It is, after all, the friggin’ moon (not that a good number
of conspiracy theorists wouldn’t tell you we were never there at all),
so why have we never gone back? Well, good thing you asked, because
writer Brian Miller and director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego have got a whopper
of a theory: Apollo 18 presents roughly 90 minutes of “found
footage” taken during a secret moon mission that followed the final official
one, and were this stuff really real, I too would strongly support an embargo
on ever going back up to that big nasty rock in the sky. Splendidly
acted, with a nice sense of slowly escalating suspense, this “Blair
Witch Project in outer space” is a film of modest pleasures, but a
rock-solid B-movie that, as the English say, does just what it says on
the tin.
The
film starts right up without a studio logo, explaining that what we’re
about to see has been culled from over 100 hours of classified footage
posted to the mysterious website www.lunartruth.com. After the final
manned moon mission, the crew assigned to the defunct Apollo 18 mission
is unexpectedly activated, now under the auspices of the Department of
Defense rather than NASA, to make a Top Secret trip to the moon and set
up motion sensor cameras and listening equipment they’re told is part of
a missile defense system. Lt. Col. John Trey (Ryan Robbins) remains
in orbit while Captain Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) and Commander Nate
Walker (Lloyd Owen) land on the moon to perform their assigned tasks.
From the get-go, something’s not right. Strange interference overlaps
their transmissions to the orbiter and Houston, and one of the moon rocks
they’ve collected turns up on the floor of the capsule, having somehow
been removed from its container. Then the astronauts make a truly
shocking discovery: a set of prints outside that don’t match their
own boots. Following the trail, they discover a Russian capsule and
a dead cosmonaut whose blood is all over its interior. Their flag
is stolen, their equipment trashed, and then another set of prints is visible,
tracks not made by human feet…
The
Blair Witch Project launched a successful subgenre of fake documentaries
generally referred to as “Found Footage” movies because they replicate
BWP’s
irresistible hook that what we’re watching is all that was left behind
by a cast that did not survive the incident we’re about to watch.
To my knowledge, Apollo 18 is the first to add another of 2011’s
favorite subgenre obsessions, revisionist history in the form of conspiratorial
sci-fi. To work, it needs to do two things well: look like
real lost documentary footage and also provide a sufficiently logical and
disturbing reason why the moon program would have been scrapped.
And on those fronts, Lopez-Gallego’s English-language debut is two-for-two.
Cinematographer
Jose David Montero has done a splendid job of matching the look of the
original NASA footage we’ve seen in documentaries like In
the Shadow of the Moon. And unlike BWP or Paranormal
Activity, which featured reasonably fresh faces playing characters
with their own names, Apollo 18’s collection of “I’m sure I recognize
that guy from someplace!” vets does terrific work persuading you they’re
actual NASA astronauts, circa 1974, and doesn’t flinch at all in the face
of the emotional heavy lifting as events spiral out of their control.
Taking advantage of the limitations of a bunch of mounted cameras that
might not have the best angle on what’s happening and people trying to
document really traumatic events while fighting for their lives, Montero
effectively keeps much of the film’s most disturbing content on the borders
of the frames, and the very effective special effects perfectly match the
documentary style while giving us just enough of a look at ooky stuff to
know what it is without ruining its scariness by virtue of being up there
in space where no one can hear you scream and calling 911 is futile.
And
Miller has accomplished his single most important task, which is coming
up with a lunar menace that can be expressed in three ominous words (the
first two of which are “Those” and “Aren’t”) and which leaves no doubt
that our dusty satellite should really be left to its own devices for the
foreseeable future. His script scatters creepy clues that are easy
to put together without ever 100% coming out and laying that Lunar Truth
flat (it wouldn’t do for a Found Footage movie to not require at least
some mental math on the viewer’s part).
Lopez-Gallego
handles the slowly escalating tension with consummate skill: the
astronauts have very little air in their suits and very little room to
maneuver inside their capsule, so despite thinking they have a whole moon
to themselves, the film’s horror strategy is built largely on claustrophobia
and the understanding that no matter how bad its characters think things
are at any given time, those of us watching the background (and occasionally
what’s making direct contact with the lens while they’re not looking) know
it’s far worse. But Apollo 18 is a deliberate film, and while
I never found it dull, it’s easy to understand why some viewers will be
put off by the professionalism with which the astronauts face their ever-deepening
crater of trouble in a genre usually populated by hysterical fools.
Apollo
18 is, as I’ve said, a modest little sci-fi thriller that gets in,
gets out and leaves you really glad you’re not on the moon. In many
ways, it’s like a high-end SyFy Original Movie that treats what those deem
sensationally exploitable and campy as deadly serious. The whole
Found Footage concept has an undeniable fascination, and it’s nice once
in a while to see one of these flicks actually cash the check it writes.
Just don’t go believing any of this is true: after all, I can’t afford
to go to the moon, why should the US government be any different? |
