Apollo 18 (dir. Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, 2011)
The conspiracy theories revolving around the moon landings exist because people are unsatisfied with the explanations for why we never went back. The Apollo program was very expensive, robots and probes don’t need to worry about oxygen or cosmic rays, and the space race was always a proxy battle between the US and USSR first, and any scientific findings were ancillary at best for anyone but those nerdlingers at NASA.
Apollo 18 is a found footage film taking the form of recordings from a classified mission to the moon that, to its marginal credit, doesn’t incorporate anything related to faking the landings, but instead incorporates every other moon conspiracy: secret Soviet landings, lost cosmonauts, and aliens. It just had to be aliens.
Aspects of the film are impressive. It mostly looks like Apollo footage, the recreated equipment usually looks like the real thing, and while they’re not great or anything, the actors have that all-American astronaut look that Liz Lemon would love. Just three Mike Dexters in space, having a real bad time: that’s the movie in a logline. Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot to the plot or characters to recommend. No surprises or shocks here, just a bunch of the moon equivalent of what I assume the rock lobsters in that B-52s song look like.
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