Apollo 18 (2011)
Summary
Genre: HorrorGoodies:
+ The creatures in the filmBaddies:
- Found footage is getting old, - Logical flaws in the filmDecades-old found footage from NASA’s abandoned Apollo 18 mission, where two American astronauts were sent on a secret expedition, reveals the reason the U.S. has never returned to the moon.
Although i’m not a fan of movies that take place in space, I thought Apollo 18 could be a good film, but I was wrong. First of all, the amount of movies featuring the “found footage” gimmick is starting to get annoying and is what makes Apollo 18 fail as a film. If someone is going to make a movie with the premise that the footage is found, that person may not want to : 1. use 200 different special effects / filtering, as basic moon cameras do not have on the fly “cut to different visual style and back to show things are scary” capabilities 2. use 200 different types of cameras; even if you are NASA, how many different types of cameras with different resolutions, colors, and qualities are you going to send in space? The type of nausea people said they experienced while watching Cloverfield is very present in this film. Every 30 seconds there is interference that causes cameras to cut out. The film is an editing nightmare and overall is not that scary. I did enjoy the actual creatures… both times I got to see them for 6 seconds. I understand making a film about atmosphere, but sometimes I want to know what creepy spider/rock/alien/monster is after the characters, but instead, their budget suggested they just have those creatures break any cameras that could see them. The film did a good job setting up the characters (although i’m not sure how much I actually cared about them getting back to Earth alive), but fails on almost every other front. The cinematography was awful and if they had kept to a formula that based itself around finding out what the creatures were and how to get back to Earth (not just during the last 20 minutes), then it could’ve been a little bit better. Also, the ending makes no sense ::Â SPOILER :: once the character gets into the Russian craft, almost 10 minutes pass until we see the rock creatures….but did he not see the tons of rocks in there before. It could be suggested that since it was semi-destroyed it could have rocks in it, which is wrong because it was sealed and because he would’ve been cautious as he knew the creatures were rock-like. END SPOILER :: The creatures were really the only selling point of this film, but since we only get to seem them for about 20 seconds total, it’s maybe worth 20 cents.
