October Horror 2011: Day 18 - Apollo 18

Apollo 18's premise is that it's pieced together from recently recovered footage taken by the crew of the Apollo 18 mission.  The last official manned moon landing was the Apollo 17 mission, and 18 was cancelled.

The story begins with the mission being uncancelled and the 3-man crew informed they'll be allowed to go to the moon.  Once they arrive they experience technical difficulties, odd sensations, and eventually discover the remains of a secret, failed Russian mission and a dead cosmonaut.  They float an implication that the creepy problems and paranoia might be a result of a haunting by the dead cosmonaut and not the obvious creepy, stealthy alien.  But it never really pans out.

I think this uses the most plausible explanation for the constant presence of camera of any found footage horror movie I have ever seen.  Even the standard "Film crew" framing device inevitably leads to at least one moment where you think to yourself "Why the hell are they filming THAT?".  Either it's wildly inappropriate, or absurdly dull.  Another common trope in found footage is the camera operator will inexplicably manage to hold the camera amazingly steady while fleeing for their lives.  I really appreciated that in Apollo 18 a lot of the cameras were stationary or mounted to something.  Either a helmet, a vehicle.  Basically anything other than an astronaut having to hold a camera.  It makes an amazing amount of logical sense and allows the director to shoot from several angles and have the camera flail wildly when handheld in a stressful situation without losing the audience.

The movie is really good at being generally tense, and the final few scenes are very hectic and had you really sucked in and focused.  However, it's not scary, it's just tense.  When the movie and ends and tension releases you find yourself really disappointed, since nothing really happens.  There are really only 2 creepy things that happen, and the rest of the movie is tension between the characters.  There's nothing wrong with that sort of tension but the problem here is that it never leads anywhere.  You never discover anything about the presence/haunting on the moon, the crew all dies and...that's that.  The end.

Even with that, I enjoyed watching it because it is good, and even creepy.  It's just a bit of a let down because none of it leads anywhere.

Tomorrow night is the Norwegian import: Troll Hunter.