Apollo 18 - Why we shouldn't go back to the moon

Having just watched Apollo 18, this summer's found footage romp in space, I am left ambivalent.

The film itself does have a new take on the found footage idea, the guy's are in space but like previous found footage movies it fails to evolve a suitably scary atmosphere.

*SPOILERS*

The actors do a reasonable job of making their characters believable and sell the paranoia that they begin to suffer from but the monsters are not something I could buy into. Warren Christie's panicked sprint to for escape as Ben Anderson, is well done and you can hear the panic in his voice, his manor in interacting with Lloyd Owen's Walker shows a man desperately trying to deal with the unknown while woefully ill-equipped to do so. His final scene in the film though is poor to say the least, not because of his acting but because the shaken and blurred bleed out while he screams his final seconds away has never been an adequate way of ending a main characters life.

Lloyd Owen manages to do two things in this film, first he pulls off a good American accent the second is to convince you he is losing grip on reality as he succumbs to the deadly space monsters. His freaking out while a creature crawls around his suit comes the closest to unsettling me in the entire film; his words fill your mind with claustrophobic sense of being locked in a room crawling with insects. His decent into madness peaks when he trashes the Lander to "stop them seeing me" is well done but the pacing leaves it isolated as a good scene in a sea of slow moving filler.

 

The monsters are spider-like creatures that hide as rocks and live in the craters around the moon's south pole (don't even get me started on the science problems), it's appearance in Walker's helmet and infecting his body only to burst out of his body at the end is very Alien and left me wondering why they didn't leave walker dead when the monsters dragged him into the dark rather a weak remaking of John Hurt's iconic scene. All in all the monsters couldn't get me scared and I felt they didn't gel well with the atmosphere and the scene of dread the movie tried to provide.

My conclusion of the film is that while the monsters were not very good and the film seemed to be based on the ranting of conspiracy theorists, it was a distracting watch but not something I would ever advise you to watch.