Apollo 18

2011 found footage thing

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A trio of astronauts venture to the moon on a secret mission that NASA never tells us about. Those sons of bitches!

In space, no one can hear you say, "Puh-leeze!"

I saw a preview for this on the big screen during one of my rare trips to the theater, and I was pretty excited about it. A found footage horror flick that takes place on the moon? It's a really cool premise. And the moon stuff looked so good in the preview, even better than the stuff that NASA did with Neil Armstrong in their studios in the late-60s. The visuals in this are never an issue. There was never a moment in this movie that I didn't believe this was taking place on the moon. The filming is imperfect from a variety of cameras, as unprofessional as it should be since it's being shot by panicking astronauts. Some of the shakiness and jitteriness could induce seizures though. And this movie is suspenseful and scary. I was on edge for most of the movie until the end when I got frustrated and bored. The main issue with this movie is the astronauts are forced to say some really dumb things, and they do it in what I can only describe as a heroic monotone delivery. The movie is sans music, like a found footage thing should be, but it's got all kinds of chittering insect noises that often seem louder than they should be and eventually become grating. There were times when the chittering (the subtitles would say things like "Chittering intensifies," so that's not my word) almost seemed more like a soundtrack than the actual sounds of moon beings. A good found footage film isn't allowed to have anything in it that wouldn't be in the footage being found, and this one has some scenes from a barbecue that just don't make sense and a lot of shots of the astronauts sleeping. Of course, the first real scare is during one of those scenes, a scene of an astronaut going "Aaaaahh!" There's a surgery scene where this thing really jumps the crater (you know, because there are no sharks on the moon--or so NASA would have us believe), and this builds up to something so frustratingly stupid that it had me slapping my forehead. Rocks? Seriously? Rocks? This was disappointing because it could have been much, much better.

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