• Movies

by Dr Chris on 09.13.11

The “lost footage/mockumentary” genre seems to hit a stalemate in terms of good quality films. What started promisingly enough with The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 has become a new kind of horror movie all its own; just not in a good way. The lost document or documentary films have been hit or miss. This past summer's Troll Hunter is really good example of a “documentary” film, but the secret-mission-to-the-moon-to-find-aliens is long, hum-drum and boring. (Editor’s Note: Beware! Spoilers do follow!)

Apollo 18 is about NASA’s secret Apollo18 mission to the moon. The reason behind is to find out what happened to a Russian crew of cosmonauts sent to the moon but never returned. The US Secretary of Defense and the Russian Prime Minister, behind closed doors, send three astronauts into space to find out what happened. I find it funny considering the movie takes place in 1974 during the height of the Cold War. So for our government and Russia to be working together must have been for the greater good of mankind. And the only threat of that scale would be aliens. Which reminds me; the aliens in the movie look like little spider-like things and the moon rocks from the dark side of the moon are the eggs they hatch from. It seems they ripped off the Lost in Space movie from back in 1998.

One problem audiences may have with this low budget, grainy, black and white “documentary” is we saw something similar in a big budget version of this dark side of the moon mystery back in June called Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That was a popcorn-chewing orgy of robot smashing fun. Apollo 18 is an hour too long. This would have worked great on a show like The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone or even Tales from the Crypt - but in theaters it just took too long to get to the end. Which is sad really; I had high hopes for this film when I saw the trailer a year ago. This is director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego’s first big budget American film. While he may normally be known for directing foreign art house films, his effort here is good but just needs some more fine polishing.