APOLLO 18 (2011 - Cert 15)

Right then, here we go again. It's found footage time once more, although this one does have the nice and clever tagline of 'There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon'. It also has the benefit of being set in space, the isolation of being nearly 240,000 miles from home and the claustrophobia of space suits and cramped space vessels. When you think about the fears that can be played and preyed upon with just those premises alone, I'm surprised that we haven't been here sooner.



The set up is the same as with all of these films - the following footage was posted on lunartruth.com, blah, blah, blah. Three men on a top secret trip to the moon, during the Cold War era, to see what the Russians are up to with their own space programme. The film is made up of a combination of handheld cameras and cameras inside the spacecraft, and it all follows their trip up into Space and onto the moon. Little glimpses of the characters are attempted but it all falls flat and quickly falls into the cliche category. But that doesn't matter really does it? The reason we watch these films are for when it all goes tits up, we want the scares, the jumps.

We don't have to wait long for things to get a little bit creepy, although you do have to wait a while for the scares. In fact, I'm still waiting. Through the Russian angle of the plot, our astronauts (well two of them, one is left orbiting the moon in the main craft) hit the surface to set up surveillance equipment so they can monitor the Commies to their heart's content, and it's while they're wandering around that we have to sit through the now usual slow build up of 'occurrences'. What's that in the background? Why is that on the moon? What does that mean? It does admittedly have an air of mystery, but without a real creep factor (like with Blair Witch for example), it is all grows a little tedious very quickly.

Then the proverbial hits the fan. There is a nugget of an interesting and original idea in the actual threat, somewhere in there, but it's executed in a way that we have seen many times before, you can go through the sci-fi horror checklist, many elements of Alien and Event Horizon sticking out the most. In fact, the video game Dead Space, whose success was so reliant on it's nods towards the genre and it's conventions without any real originality, seems as though it contributed one or two ideas here. There are a couple of jumpy moments, which don't really take much to pull off these days, especially with a dark room and a handheld camera, but you can see them coming a mile off. Even with the nice tension-building touch of one of the astronauts being in a pitch black crater with only the use of a camera flash for intermittent moments of light, you know it's coming and it takes the edge away from it.

There is a conspiracy plot in there as well which doesn't fit, and trying to explain something like that in a film that is meant to be tacked together with blocks of footage feels contrived and out of place. The acting by the cast of unknowns is efficient at best, I was never entirely convinced of the characters and because of the format the terror isn't something that is really conveyed through facial expressions and delivery of dialogue, it's more screams in space helmets. They do a fairly average job with what they are given.

As it builds towards the finale I was anticipating a big pay off, the mystery coming together and leaving something with me as the credits roll, just like Blair Witch and the fella standing in the corner, but it never really gets there. This flat ending is pretty much synonymous with the rest of film. It's all made pretty well, it looks polished but for a budget of £5m for this type of film you would expect that. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is to go back to the Russians, more precisely, Russian Dolls - there are a number of layers to the film, all look and seem decent enough and nicely made, but ultimately at the centre of it all, it's empty and not at all satisfying.

Found footage films aren't dead (check out The Troll Hunter), but if film makers aren't going to do anything new or interesting with the idea, then don't bother.