Apollo 18 (2011)

Suppose, following the official final lunar mission of Apollo 17 in December 1972, that the once-aborted Apollo 18 mission had been taken over by the Pentagon and sent to the Moon on a highly secret mission? That's the premise behind the 2011 film APOLLO 18, a film that is not only a conspiracy tract, but also something of an outer-space shocker a la the 1979 blockbuster ALIEN. The premise of this pseudo-documentary sci-fi enterprise is that, under a cloak of secrecy so great that apparently not even the same American media that uncovered the truth of Watergate knows about, the Department of Defense sent a three-man crew to the Moon on Apollo 18 in December 1974 on an errand that the crew clearly knew nothing about beforehand. Everything seems to go well at first; the two men (Warren Christie; Lloyd Owen) who land on the Moon in the lunar module "Liberty" make their landing as routine as anything we saw during the real Apollo program (with the exception, of course, of the Apollo 13 mission of 1970, which almost took a fatal turn). But once they get there, they discover what would appear to be an actual Russian lunar module a mere three miles from their landing site; and when they enter the module, they see the interior is in a shambles, with blood over the control panels, and a couple of very dead Russian cosmonauts. Even more, Own and Christie discover tracks made on the Moon's surface that are neither theirs nor those of the cosmonauts--indicating, of course, extra-terrestrial life (a premise that defies a lot of scientific credibility since, at least during the actual Apollo missions, no evidence of such a thing was ever found on the Moon's airless surface). But then the extra-terrestrial creatures, which look like mini-crabs, appear out of the lunar rocks, and then.... Basically a combination of various conspiracy-type sci-fi films (e.g. HANGAR 18, CAPRICORN ONE) , legitimate sci-fi (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY; ALIEN), docudrama (APOLLO 13), and "found horror footage" (THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT), APOLLO 18 was largely financed by the very independent brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein for what was an extremely paltry amount, $5 million. Given its attempts at BLAIR WITCH-style tactics (shaky cameras; grainy video; strobe lights) and working with technology that existed back in the mid-1970s, the makers of APOLLO 18 have sought to exploit that market of so-called "found film" footage that popped up after BLAIR WITCH's sudden and huge success in 1999. The finished product has many of the same flaws and high points of BLAIR WITCH; the acting by the three principal actors cannot be expected to be on the level of Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, or Bill Paxton in APOLLO 13. And it certainly has too many credibility gaps to either be as enlightening as "2001" or as scary as ALIEN, though, strangely, the brief moments when the lethal crab-like creatures do appear in person (mostly, they are implied) give off a shock factor not far removed from THE BIRDS or JAWS, which is far better than most horror films of recent vintage have managed to do. Not surprisingly, both NASA and the Pentagon disavowed giving the makers of APOLLO 18 any help in its making, and it's just as well. This movie is no masterpiece by any reasonable definition of the term, even given a budget that, by today's sci-fi standards, is very low indeed. As an experiment in combining conspiracy theories, pseudo-documentary techniques, legitimate sci-fi, and horror, however, it does succeed in certain ways that very few others of its type ever dreamed of.