Apollo 18

[minor spoilers]

Okay – right after me and my pal saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes we decided to sneak in to see Apollo 18. Now, I haven’t snuck in to a movie in almost thirty years, so that in itself was comical. And something to mention next time I’m in Confession. Chalk it up to peer pressure. Normally I’d feel guilty about depriving the producer and director some well-deserved royalties from my ticket price.

Not this time.

Since seeing the trailer for Apollo 18 over the summer I’d been mildly interested in seeing the flick. Kind of a haunted-house-in-space theme, or in this case, on the moon during the lunar landing era. Perhaps moreso than the premise itself, I was curious to see how the premise was executed.

Verdict on that: not so good.

I was really, really impressed with the movie Paranormal Activity, as you may have read, here. To a lesser extent, it’s sequel, too. Evolved from such predecessors as The Blair Witch Project and Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, these faux documentaries are usually exponentially scarier than typical, plot-plodding Hollywood horrorfests.

Apollo 18 is built right out of that fabric. This time it’s “recently discovered footage” of the “top secret Apollo 18 mission” to the moon, uploaded onto some conspiracy website. Okay. I’ll buy into it and suspend belief for ninety minutes. [Considering 99 percent of the public doesn’t know that Apollo 17 in 1972 was the last lunar mission, is it any wonder NASA apparently had to release a press statement disavowing the movie?]

However, the whole thing just didn’t work somehow. Driving home and pondering the movie, I realized that the story just plain didn’t make any logical sense. The whole reason behind the mission was stupid, the “cover-up” was stupid, the “aliens” were stupid. The whole movie hinges on a couple of WHAM! scares – something creeping about in the background of a shot (hello, Paranormal Activity), something crawling in an astronaut’s suit, something dead on the moon that shouldn’t be there.

There were a few things I enjoyed about it, though. The opening ten or fifteen minutes of can-do Apollo spacecraft and astronauts never fails to bring shivers of pride up and down my arm. And the Russian spacecraft looked very, very cool, too; props to the filmmakers for envisioning what the Soviet manned program might have developed.

Overall, though, the movie stunk. Chatting with my buddy on the way out I graded it a D, and I see no reason to upgrade it a week later.