Apollo 18 (2011)
Certified: 12
Duration: 86 minutes
Directed by: Gonzalo López-Gallego
Starring: Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen, Ryan Robbins
KRS release
Although not the first of its kind, The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought the mockumentary style to the mainstream public. A decade later, this genre, which utilises mostly hand-held camera and video footage to give it a reality feel, has delivered a lot of duds and few gems.
Cloverfield (2008), Paranormal Activity (2007) and parts of District 9 (2009) are among the gems in question but sadly enough, Apollo 18 is no such thing. If you boil it down, the film is simply Paranormal Activity in space, with all the relevant action occurring in the last moments and with little feeling of dread or suspense. Being directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego and produced by Timur Bakmembeetov (Wanted, Nightwatch), I was expecting more from this film.
Apollo 18 opens in 1974 showing the protagonists at a barbecue, smiling, drinking with their families. They are consequently given the news that they will be sent to the moon on the Apollo 18 mission. John (Ryan Robbins) will not set foot on the moon but remain on the orbiter. Nathan (Lloyd Owen) and Ben (Warren Christie) form two-thirds of the mission’s personnel and they are the two who land on the moon. The secret mission’s objective is to set up special equipment that will help survey and keep tabs on anything that the Russians come up with. The mission is so secret that not even their families know about it.
On landing, the two find another space module, Russian in make, seemingly abandoned with all fuel still left in it. On investigation they discover blood on the ship and also a dead cosmonaut. They also start experiencing unusual occurrences such as sounds, footprints that do not seem to be human, the disappearance of the American flag, damages to the ship and unusual radio noise.
At one point while Nathan tries to repair the damage he starts to writhe in pain. It seems that something has entered into his space suit. Ben brings Nathan inside the capsule and that is when it becomes obvious that Nathan seems to be infected with something unknown. With no help forthcoming, the astronauts realise that they may be stranded for a purpose: for the government to study their reactions and the alien occurrences.
The interesting aspect of Apollo 18 lies mostly in the film’s point of view. Most mockumentary films simply follow their protagonists around. Here the film takes another angle and gives us an insight into what it means to live and work in the cramped confines of a lunar module.
The direction also goes through the painstaking method of giving the film an authentic feel, with grainy detail and a choppy sheen to it. It seems that the video footage may actually be real and this is what further reinforced my disappointment.
With all this effort to provide us with an accurate feel of space flights, why then not spice things up and keep things exciting and not making the film look like it were double its length in duration. I understand that the film-makers were going for a slow, building-up of tension and suspense but there was simply nothing to start building upon.
The film is supposed to be based on real facts but the Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were all cancelled, even though this film and conspiracy theorists claim that these missions were actually carried out but that Nasa was not happy with its discoveries: alien life.
The story in this feature seems to be a rehash of The Thing From Another World (1951) and Alien (1979). By the end of it, I was very confused as to the relation between the running spiders and the footprints that were found as these could not have been made by the same creature. Maybe this mystery will be solved in such (fictional) titles as Apollo 19: The Unknown Mission Continues and Apollo 20: The Final Mission of No Return.