Mania Grade: C-

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Info:

• Starring: Warren Christie and Lloyd Owen
• Written by: Brian Miller and Cory Goodman
• Directed by: Gonzalo López-Gallego
• Studio: Dimension Films
• Rating: R
• Run Time: 86 minutes
• Series:

Mania Review: Apollo 18

Apollo 18
© Dimension Films/Robert Trate

The cold opening for Apollo 18 – coupled with the way its release bounced around the calendar like a deranged game of Whack-a-Mole – suggests a terminal stinker. In point of fact, it’s not. It’s tired, used up and utterly free of the menacing atmosphere required to make the concept work, but the summer has produced far worse. Indeed, the film begins with a reasonably solid notion of a secret mission to the moon that uncovers horrors Not of This Earth. But the found-footage format and lack of appreciable direction prevent it from taking off.

First-time director Trevor Cawood bends over backwards to establish proper authenticity. The lunar module inhabited by our hapless astronauts looks spot-on and the archival footage of actual missions blends seamlessly with the make-believe that takes place once they land. Unfortunately, the story can’t support a feature-length running time, leading to a lot of dead space masquerading as suspense. The astronauts land on Christmas 1974 – years after the Apollo program supposedly shut down – and start setting up a lot of cameras at the behest of the Department of Defense. Soon enough, creepy noises start showing up outside the module and a shredded Soviet lander – complete with desiccated corpse – appears during a routine walkabout.

Naturally, they aren’t alone out there. And in a better movie, we’d feel that reality getting under our skin almost from the get-go. The moon is so desolate and isolated – and yet retains so much of its mystery – that the notion of something scuttling out of one of those craters might really send a goose across our grave. But Apollo 18 can’t harness that potential. We never get a good look at the creepy-crawlies, which might deliver some serious “less is more” scares in better hands. Instead, we grow increasingly frustrated waiting for a terrifying monster that never truly makes it presence known.

 In the meantime, the rest of the film plays like cast-offs from NASA’s blooper reel. The astronauts grouse about their food, tag and bag the rocks they claim, and basically don’t do any wondering about why they might need to set up motion-sensing cameras on the moon.  The bumps and jolts arrive with no sense of timing or tact, utterly failing to shocks us and only contributing to the growing sense of boredom that ultimately suffocates the film.

The found-footage format doesn’t help. Apollo 18 completely shackles itself to its conspiracy theory premise, demanding that everything come from “actual” film stock on the doomed ship.  This beggars the question of how the footage got back to Earth in an era before digital transmissions (which either blows the ending or creates an inescapable plot hole). More importantly, it prevents any appreciable scares from developing: limited to the film reel suddenly running out and the now-shopworn “something horrible is happening that we can’t quite see” shtick.

Things pick up a bit towards the end, when implicit threats become manifest and TPTB back on Earth make their true motivations clear. Apollo 18 recovers with a half-decent twist at the very end and a sense of spirit des corps among the astronauts themselves that enhances our sympathy for them. But the various developments preceding it advertise their status as plot extensions long before they come into play, lending a mechanistic aspect to the finale that robs it of any impact.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that we’ve seen far too many of these locked-box movies before: 14 years after The Blair Witch Project, we know exactly what to expect. Of course, talented filmmakers can still find ways to make it work; Paranormal Activity constitutes the genre’s unquestionable masterpiece and it arrived just a couple of years ago. Apollo 18 finds little of the menace, elegance or artistry that it needs to survive. The basics are there; it just can’t run with them… and with the likes of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark still in theaters, there’s no need to indulge its shortcomings.