Space Garbage

When it was finally released in theaters last year after months and months of delays, the movie Apollo 18 was pretty thoroughly savaged by the critics. It was enough of a drubbing to convince me to avoid paying theater prices for it... and yet not enough to talk me out of it entirely.

The thing is, I always have been and always will be a total space junkie. I just find the subject endlessly fascinating, particularly space travel. So even fictionalized crap like this (and let's face it, it was probably going to be crap), I had to give a chance.

Apollo 18 is a "found footage" movie in the style of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, following a secret and classified seventh moon landing that occurred after the official end of the Apollo program. The astronauts discover more than they bargained for. (Here's where you'd cue the dramatic music, except these kinds of movies never have music.)

The idea of the plot is compelling enough on its own. But the execution of the plot is mostly rather dumb. The characters behave stupidly, the scares are cheap ones, the dialogue is often cheesy. But the question of how to "fix" this movie is a surprisingly thorny one.

The single biggest flaw in the narrative is-- well, hang on. I suppose I'd better give you a mild spoiler warning here. I'm not going to talk specifics, and frankly I'll bet you know exactly how this movie will end anyway, but if you don't want to know anything even in general terms, skip over the next paragraph, alright?

Okay then, so the single biggest flaw in the narrative is that it fails to answer the question "where did this footage come from?" Sure, there's this opening crap about some kind of hackers putting it up on a web site. And there's even some in-movie loose justification for why this Apollo flight suddenly has about five times as many cameras on board as any predecessors. But I mean literally, "how did they recover this footage?" During the film, it's made expressly clear that the film was never transmitted back to Earth; by the end, it's just as clear that it was never physically brought back either. So, kind of a gaping plot hole rendering the entire conceit of the "found footage" impossible.

But, on the flip side, this conceit actually leads to the best thing about the entire movie. The way this movie is filmed and then treated in post-production, it feels quite authentically like NASA moon landing footage most of the time. The film looks old and flawed (though not distractingly so). And this solid effort at authenticity in turn lifts the quality of the movie considerably. I've written in reviews of other movies that I don't usually go just for pretty images on film in place of solid story or character, but here the look of the film actually gives the footage a sort of character of its own.

So... they could have fixed the gaping plot hole by abandoning the found footage gimmick and just playing the movie straight. But unless the writing somehow then also got worlds better in the process, you'd only be left with a really lame thriller that didn't have the one element that really worked well in the movie, the solid effort at authentic early 1970s moon footage. Quite the conundrum.

Regardless of what the movie could have been, what it is isn't very good. I'm not sure it's as awful as the reviews said, but then, maybe that's my love of space and space travel causing me to be a bit more forgiving than I should. I rate it a C-. If you're a space junkie like me, maybe it's worth your time. Otherwise, it's probably best avoided.