"Apollo 18" (2011)

Apollo 18 is as conceptually ill-thought out as it is poorly executed. The film is a found footage film about a conspiratorial cover up of a botched, secret NASA lunar space launch. Not only is the found footage genre ill-equipped for advancing such a story, but the found footage concept is awfully handled and utilized at nearly every turn. The film is filled with distortions and impossible filmed moments that only pile onto the questionable nature of a story that is already highly implausible to begin with. When the film isn't being utterly ridiculous, it's being surprisingly boring. For a film with a lurid, crazy premise, Apollo 18 is all sorts of not fun. Unevenly paced, and even more problematically plotted, with characters that have no other discernible character traits besides macho and ruggedly heroic, the screenplay is full of gems on not what to do to tell a story. The simplicity of the characters isn't even effectively used for baiting them as victims of the strange extraterrestrial phenomenon occurring on the moon and that provides the film its horror elements. The horror elements are the film's most interesting moments but they're few and far between, ill-timed and haphazardly executed. Apollo 18 is more of a science fiction premise with an underlying horrific suggestion, but the true horror comes from how the astronauts' superior officers back on Earth respond to these inquiries and troubles, signing their death sentences with bureaucratic and covert self-preservation. It's truly the film's most unsettling moment but the film has already long since given up on any semblance of depth so it hardly matters.

Grade: .5/4