Apollo 18

Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego's Apollo 18 commits some of the worst sins you can in a horror movie. It's painfully slow and deadly dull, it's not the least-bit scary, it has a cast of characters we care nothing about, and a monster that we care even less about. Despite being less than 90 minutes long, the movie still feels bloated and pointless. This only adds to my theory that a good movie can never be too long, whereas a bad one can never be too short.

The movie is yet another one of those films trying to pass itself off as "lost footage" of some terrifying event, in the style of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. This time, the lost footage is supposed to come from a top secret and confidential visit to the moon's surface that three astronauts made around Christmas of 1974. The problem is that despite the filmmakers' best efforts to make the footage look faded and authentic, there is something a little too slick and modern about the production. And when the little computer generated monsters start showing up, all sense of "authenticity" flies out the window. The dialogue between the astronauts also sounds artificial and rehearsed. If you're going to try to pass your movie off as top secret government footage that a major Hollywood studio just happened to come across, and release on screens over Labor Day weekend, you could at least try a little harder.

So, what happens during the film? First, we meet the three men who will make up the crew - Two of them will actually go down to the surface of the moon to collect space rocks and other materials, while the third will stay behind and lead them back home. The two guys on the surface of the moon mess around for a little while, until they come across an abandoned Soviet space module, a corpse, and strange footprints that don't belong to either of them. The rocks that they bring back to their base turn out to be little CG spider-scorpion things that crawl inside the spacesuit of one of the two men, and then burrows into his skin. What are these creatures, and what are their purpose? We really don't know, which I guess is supposed to make the movie scarier, but seems more to me like the screenwriter checking off his list of mandatory cliches. Every space horror movie needs to have an alien get inside the skin of a human at some point.

Apollo 18 goes nowhere, and even worse, goes nowhere at a leisurely pace. Instead of intensifying or raising tension, the movie kind of drones along, almost as if it doesn't know why it should even bother. It makes no use of its claustrophobic environments, creates no tension, and sets up no thrills. I don't know what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish here. If they wanted us to think this was real footage, why did they shoot with such a laughably implausible number of cameras? If they wanted us to feel something for these guys trapped on the moon, why didn't they give us something to feel for them? If they wanted this to be a tense thriller, why did they leave out the tense thrills? And why were the actors made to act as calm as possible, even when they're supposed to be scared?

When I reviewed The Debt a couple days ago, I called it a nice change of pace from the norm we usually get on the Labor Day holiday weekend. Apollo 18 is every bit the norm - Unexciting, uninteresting, and devoid of just about everything we go to the movies for. Unless you're the biggest outer space conspiracy nut on the face of the planet, there's no need to see this.

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