Apollo 18 Review

From IGN

The Good – The mission procedures make it feel like an authentic Apollo mission.

The Bad – Distracting use of filters to make the footage look older. Sloppy editing. Threadbare story.

Walking out of the theater after Apollo 18, I overheard a girl tell her group of friends, “I’m sorry guys. I had no idea it would be like that.” That pretty much sums up everyone’s thoughts after the movie. Apollo 18 is terrible movie-going experience.

In my Movies of the Month piece for September, I stated that the “found footage” genre might have a bit of life left in it if filmmakers can continue to come up with fresh ideas built around the concept. I thought that a found footage movie set on the moon had potential. Fifteen minutes into Apollo 18, I changed my mind. It didn’t take long for me to wish that the filmmakers had just shot a movie and abandoned the restrictions imposed by the found footage gimmick.

One of the biggest offenses lies in the treatment of the footage. In an effort to make the footage seem period for 1972, the filmmakers have applied all sorts of filters to make it look grainy, wash out the colors, even give some stuttering and warping effects to make it look like we’re watching it on an old projector. This is very distracting. Combine this with choppy editing, a real no-no when the whole concept is that the movie was whittled down from 84 hours of raw footage, and watching the movie takes away from the story.

The story itself could have been so much better. There is inherent risk in space travel, and none of that really comes through during the first half of the film. The filmmakers spend most of the first half of the film making the movie feel like a real Apollo mission. There’s a lot of attention to detail with the mission, the capsule, NASA procedures, etc. But, that means the movie isn’t exactly scary for the first hour. Everything goes according to plan until the creatures show up and start monkeying around with the crew. Even when things start to get spooky, the found footage conventions limit the effectiveness of the scares. At this point in the found footage genre, it’s not very frightening when we hear a loud noise outside and the crew responds,  “What was that? What’s going on out there?” You’ve got to do more than that to really scare an audience these days.

From IGN

There are a number of other things going on outside of the mission that could have been useful to add weight to the paper-thin characters and tension to a paper-thin horror film. References to family, arguments with Houston and Department of Defense, contact with the Russians. All this peripheral stuff is so glossed over that it doesn’t really mean anything. There’s a good concept for a movie here, but the execution of it all is terrible. I mostly blame the filmmakers for sticking with the found footage because it severely limits what they can do.

Ultimately, Apollo 18 has convinced me that the found footage genre needs to go away. The conventions imposed by this genre prevent filmmakers from telling interesting, fully fleshed-out stories. It seems like it should be easy to make a horror movie set in space, but Apollo 18 proves otherwise. There just aren’t enough scares in here to make it worthwhile. 

1.5 out of 5