Pick of the Week: Apollo 18

By Horacio Garcia

We all know that NASA's last mission to the moon was the uneventful Apollo 17 (if compared to let's say Apollo 13, I don't mean that going to the Moon is small potatoes…) but the sad truth is that the greatest space program in history died of public apathy and a sense of "being there, done that".

Apollo 18 is a new addition in the long list of conspiracy theories that surrounds the Space Program and begins with the premise that NASA sent an eighteenth mission to la Luna in 1974.

During this last year, the producers at Weinstein Company have being baiting public and critics with the new movie, only releasing a couple of trailers and some cryptic statements like  Bob Weinstein's to Entertainment Weekly saying the footage was real: "We didn’t shoot anything, we found it! Found, Baby!".

This is the kind of thing you might expect from Bob, but the truth is that the phrase tells in advance the kind of movie Apollo 18 turns out to be.

Is interesting that when I went to see it, I thought it was going to be a lot in the Blair Witch Project style and it is in a way; the supposedly recovered footage from the Secret Mission and the untold horrors that it reveals put the movie into that particularly type of film, but the similarities end there. Where Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity are in a sense forceful and hysterical, Apollo 18 is brainy and claustrophobic and I must acknowledge the very difficult cinematography of the movie, with its close shoots that increase the sense of entrapment.

The success of Apollo 18 as horror movie resides in the painful way in which it was filmed, always in close spaces where there is no place to run, and the laboriously staged multiple shooting that shift the angle from one security camera to another as the Thing moves around. Kudos to director Gonzalo Lopez Gallegos for the atmosphere he creates. Lopez Gallegos is known for a very sleek little horror movie he made in 2007 named El Rey de la Montaña, and is a fact that the man has some skills in the trade.

The main story concentrates in two astronauts of a crew of three that actually descend on the moon: Walker, played by Lloyd Owen and Anderson, played by Warren Christie, and from the beginning it's more a psychological thriller than anything else.

The tension is masterly built and even a seasoned moviegoer will take a couple of jumps in the seat when the climatic moments come. The fact that Walker and Anderson are practically stepping on each other all the time in their secluded little moon capsule, adds that sense of invasion of the personal space that will make the watching more difficult for American audiences.

I'm quite sure that both Lopez Gallegos and producer Timur Bekmanbetov were counting on American discomfort for body closeness when the decided to go along with the project.

All in all a satisfying horror flick that I'm not sure to put in the B-List category, and that if word of mouth goes around will have a decent showing in the box office. Time will tell.

Tags Apollo 18, blogger: Horacio Garcia, Gonzalo Lopez Gallegos, Lloyd Owen, Timur Bekmanbetov, Warren Christie