Monday, September 5, 2011

Apollo 18 (2011) */*****


Found footage films that tell their story exclusively through shaky, grainy footage that has supposedly been recovered from some sort of disaster and then edited together so the public can know the truth about what happened are awful. The gimmick is only cute for about a couple minutes, and then all of the herky-jerky camera work, the constraints the gimmick puts on the way the story can be told, and the contrivances that give the gimmick away as being inauthentic overwhelm the film and sink what might have been a decent story if it had just been written, shot, and presented in a traditional way. Apollo 18 is one of these found footage movies, and it’s maybe the most insufferable one I’ve ever seen.

Everyone knows that Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon, but what this movie presupposes is that; maybe it wasn’t? What we’re watching is supposedly declassified footage from the top secret Apollo 18 mission. A trip to the moon that ended with disastrous results; results not revealed to the public until now, in the form of a late-summer movie theater release. Sure. Let’s cut to the chase: the first ten minutes of Apollo 18 are maybe the most boring ten minutes of any film I’ve ever watched. Things get moderately more interesting once we get into space, but moderately more interesting than the most boring thing I’ve ever watched is still extremely boring. Luckily for me, there was a couple sitting behind me during the screening, surrounded by a smorgasbord of snacks, who were committed to doing running commentary to each other all the way through the film. Their over the top lack of theater etiquette gave me something to focus on other than this miserable movie. Eventually I stopped taking my own notes about the picture and just started writing down everything that they were saying instead. So, in lieu of a proper plot synopsis, I will present to you with this insightful stream of thought:

“Yeah, that’s the moon, I know we lookin’ at the moon already. Them rocks is alive. That look like somebody already been there. That’s the Soviets. The Soviets been f*#@ed up! Look at it; it was like a spider or something. Get out of there! (At this point the first walkout in my theater happened) It was a alien, and he know it too. That’s the outer shell of it. The rock is the shell! (At this point the second walkout in my theater happened) Aw, there you go, now it’s infected him. Oh! I almost threw up! He gots to go, it’s time to whack him. Nate gone completely wacko now, boy. Them a*@holes ain’t talkin’ to him no more, that’s the government for you. Oh, that’s his boy! He gonna try and bring him up anyway!”

As you may or may not be able to tell, Apollo 18 is about a trio of indiscernible astronauts landing on the moon and coming up against a horde of sneaky, killer moon rocks. And that’s the interesting part of the movie. The rest of what we get is a lot of still footage of nothing happening, or security cam footage of the astronauts speaking technical NASA jargon into microphones. The frantically shaken handheld camera work is predictably annoying, especially in the first few minutes of the movie that take place on Earth, but once they get into the confined spaces of the lunar vessel the constant motion calms down a bit. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the editing doesn’t calm down, so what we get is a bunch of still shots of nothing happening, shot from a million different angles, with an editor frantically switching back and forth through them like he’s playing some sort of film editing version of Whac-A-Mole. The results are somehow both nauseating and boring.

So, because of the movie’s found footage gimmick, Apollo 18 visually has nothing to offer. But the badness doesn’t end there; the gimmick ruins the characters, dialogue, and story as well. Since we have to believe that these are really clean-cut astronaut types, they’re never allowed to do or say anything engaging. They just have to be boring and professional. A little humor tries to creep in here and there, but seeing as it is the type of humor straight-laced NASA employees would have to be able to conceivably come up with on the fly, in front of government cameras, none of it is funny. The astronauts encounter aliens on their trip, that much is clear, but seeing as everything has to be shown to us through their confused perspective, through footage that they supposedly shot, we never learn anything about the aliens, what they are, what they’re doing, or how they logistically work as creatures. So it becomes essentially impossible to care about any of what’s happening. You don’t know what might happen next, you have no indication of what the stakes are, so there’s no suspense to be had. And if this was really found footage edited together by people who were trying to get the word out about government cover-ups of alien life, I think they would have edited this thing a little bit tighter to not bore people and make sure this life or death message gets out there. Even at a runtime of under an hour and a half, Apollo 18 feels like it’s biding it’s time, padding itself with dry footage of nothing happening. I’m sure official word from the filmmakers is that this is a “slow build”, but I think it’s pretty clear that it’s really an idea fitting of a half hour TV show stretched out to almost feature film length; for no reason.

There were several times during the movie where I got so bored my mind wandered off a bit, and then when I focused back on the film I thought for a second I was watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. There was no sign of the silhouettes of the Satellite of Love gang lampooning the killer moon rocks movie I was watching at the bottom of the screen, however. Surely I wasn’t really just sitting here un-ironically watching a movie about killer moon rocks was I? Oh God, it turns out I was. Instead of speaking the last word on this film myself, I’ll turn things back over to the noisy couple sitting behind me, and the succinct yet accurate review that the wife shouted at the screen during the closing credits, “That movie sucked! Boooooo!”