Houston we have a problem; there is another life form on the moon.
“Apollo 18” tells the story of a 1974 top secret mission to the moon through decades of found footage. The film was footage from the NASA space mission and was found online.
The low-budget film, directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, fails to build suspense and doesn’t live up to its sci-fi counterparts as evidenced by failure in the box office.
A sloppy and thrown together film tells the story of three astronauts, John Grey (Ryan Robbins), Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) and Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen), who were sent by NASA on a space mission to the moon. They were sent to set up devices to intercept Soviet signals when they encounter things they would never expect to find on the moon and the mission didn’t go as planned.
Funded by the Department of Defense, the mission was never disclosed to the general public because of its disastrous outcome.
But after an unreliable website got a hold of the 80 hours of footage from space, the secret was revealed on the big screen.
If this doesn’t create initial disbelief, the film itself will.
An uninteresting story-line and missing plot makes this a dull film. Without any tension-building scenes, there are hardly any scares and absolutely no surprises.
The first 40 minutes of the film was painfully slow and a bit confusing; the story seemed completely make believe and the actors were all together confused.
But about an hour into the film, the action finally started when the two astronauts landed on the moon and discovered another life form.
At this point, it became a predictable horror film; the rock creatures were both deadly and monstrous. And, of course, they have the ability to take over the human body. Just as the film reaches this climax, it ends and the credits fill the big screen.
Not only is the film boring, it fails to educate the audience on the paranormal and never uncovers any of the mystery. Instead, it relied on the grainy, found-footage to create the horror.
Yet, the shaky camera work was far from gripping like similar films, “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity.”
The constant motion was annoying and made the film almost impossible to watch. Just as a thrilling scene might have captured the audience, all the shaking caused nausea rather than a scare.
And on top of all this far-fetched footage, the actual reason NASA has yet to send another person in orbit is laughable. But let’s leave that up to the film because it might just be the only real reason to see “Apollo 18” in theaters.
Stick to reading about this space mission in textbooks because the mission has surprising developments and the threat of an unknown life form.
And let’s hope there is no talk of a sequel to this drab science fiction space mission mishap.
