Mister Minutes' Cinema Circus

Originally published on March 21, 2020.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that the first movie of the Quarantine Cinema Club wasn't exactly Citizen Kane, but it's also the most "Minutes would love this" movie idea ever.

Apollo 18 is a found-footage movie about NASA's cancelled 1973 moon mission. The movie claims that the mission did occur, and the recovered footage was cobbled together to create this film.
The three-man crew arrives on the moon, and while setting up some experimental transmitter thing for the Department of Defense, they discover an abandoned Soviet lander and a dead cosmonaut with his helmet broken in a nearby crater, murdered by some unknown force. Cool setup! But how do they pull it off?

Well, the first - and most complimentary - thing I must say is that the movie looks great. The film footage, costumes, and set design all make for a believable 1973, as the movie begins with pre-mission interview footage with the astronauts. It actually feels a little too natural, which brings up an issue I tend to have with found-footage movies: it's hard to have a "character backstory exposition moment" without it feeling unnatural. You have to get creative with how you flesh out your characters in a found-footage movie, but unfortunately Apollo 18 does not. We only get base details about these men, such as:

...um. Hm. That colon was there because I thought I was going to list off their base details, but truly all I can remember is that one of them has a wife and kid.

I watched this movie half an hour ago.

Anyway, they go into space. The mission is being kept very secret; not even their families know their true destination. The Department of Defense has commandeered their mission as a means to set up some uninteresting transmitter things on the lunar surface. These transmitters are not important until they are, and even then they're not very important. After the run-in with the dead Russian, the astronauts begin hearing weird skittering and chittering outside the lander, as if little creatures are running around on the outside. They seem about as surprised by this as they would be if it started hailing out of nowhere on a sunny afternoon, despite the massive implications it could have for human civilization. Now that the horror is starting up, the movie realizes that the non-horror footage really isn't very interesting, so it resorts to awful, baseline horror editing. Digital glitches (on film stock), cameras shaking, obvious digitally added distortion and shit. There's even a point where one character does the awful "shaking my head really fast cause that's scaaaary" thing that all bad horror movies do. There are camera cuts where it makes no sense, or where a static shot would have been more effective. Basically it boils down to "who took this uncovered NASA footage and purposely edited it to look scary?"

If we follow the pretense that this footage is "real" and the film was made to raise awareness and uncover the conspiracy, why, as the person uncovering NASA's wrongdoing, would you edit the footage into what obviously is a horror movie? The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are some of the best examples of the found footage genre, and they are so scary and effective because they aren't edited like horror movies. There are tons of long, lingering, awkward shots, minutes of nothing happening, the footage feels as if it hasn't been doctored in any way. Apollo 18 is so obviously digitally edited that it kills all tension with its distracting effects. It's clear that the director realized the story and characters were incredibly uninteresting, and told the editor to spice things up in post.

Along with the story being boring, by the end of the movie the camera itself seems to have gotten bored and decided to do whatever it wants. Inside the orbiter module overhead, a camera seems to be floating in zero gravity and just rotating back and forth while focusing on the character. If it's obviously not bolted to a wall, then why would it stay focused on him instead of floating off into another wall or something? The character seems totally unconcerned by his camera levitating for no reason.

To make found-footage believable, there have to be rules in your world, namely with camera placement, so that it feels believable and real. In The Blair Witch Project there are two cameras, being held by the characters at all times. In Paranormal Activity there are security cameras in various rooms, and one handheld camcorder. Each of the security cameras films one location, and the camcorder comes in when you need more personal, intimate shots. In these examples the camera placement feels very natural: The cameras either act as the character's point of view, helping to create a sense of action and movement, or they are static, detached observers watching over events. Apollo 18 uses both methods, with little success. In three instances it cuts to a motion sensor camera shot; the camera then slow-zooms in on a point, and you know they're trying to show you something important there, but there's just literally fucking nothing interesting or standout to focus on. (Also, it just occurred to me - these astronauts didn't think it was strange that they were being sent up to the moon with motion activated cameras? It doesn't matter, they weren't utilized well anyway.) There are some really amazing shots in Paranormal Activity where the camera is just static, for minutes at a time, creating tension in you because you're looking for something in the room. You get paranoid from waiting - then a door opens an inch and you shit your pants because you noticed it on your own. There's one point where the movie literally pauses and zooms in on an alien hiding nearby, and fucking highlights it with a circle like a YouTube conspiracy video, and I still wasn't interested or scared.

Which brings us to the next topic: Is it scary?

No. It isn't. There was not a single moment where I was scared, or even tense, and only one moment actually got a slight startle out of me. There's a scene where one of the astronauts goes into a crater, completely obscured in darkness because of the sun's orientation. He brings down a... camera? It's definitely not a flashlight because it flashes like a camera. I dunno. But I do know that camera flash sequences in horror movies instantly get me excited, cause you know they're about to show you some crazy shit. Not Apollo 18, though. Apollo 18 dares to break the mold by making the easiest scare setup ever totally not scary. There's a shot of a cosmonaut skeleton in his suit, and that's it. And that fucking up of the easiest scare ever is indicative of the whole movie's horror effort.

This movie also fails at dropping "horror hints". Horror hints are like, when a character takes up most of the shot, but over her shoulder you suddenly catch a glimpse of the monster sneaking past. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment and a great opportunity to put your audience on edge. Apollo 18 tries and fails multiple times to drop horror hints, and when you do finally realize what the monster is, it's so fucking stupid that you don't care.

Are you ready for this? You wanna know what the monster is? You sure you can handle this shit?

They're rocks.

Moon rocks.

No fucking joke the aliens are moon rocks that sprout crab legs and kill you somehow, I guess. I could end this review right there, but I'll level with you - it's not the worst idea for a realistic moon alien. I get it. Though I do question what they eat, or do all day, when it seems their only purpose is to sit and pretend to be moon rocks until an astronaut picks one up. The film even ends with text talking about how hundreds of moon rocks had been brought to Earth by the previous Apollo missions, and now most of them are missing. But the idea that those rocks are aliens is so fucking absurd, because it doesn't even try to explain why those rocks, many given as gifts to foreign dignitaries, never turned into crabs and killed Mikhail Gorbachev or something.

All in all, Apollo 18 is an interesting 45 minute YouTube conspiracy video dragged out into an hour and a half long movie. The script is uninteresting, the characters are nonexistent, the sets and costumes are good, the editing is bad, and the aliens are stupid. I wouldn't recommend it, which is disappointing, since it could have been such a cool movie with a different script.