Once upon a time back in the late 90s, a group of filmmakers decided that they were too poor and stupid to make an actual movie or anything resembling an actual movie, so they went and pissed around in the woods with a camcorder for a few hours and wrapped some cloth around a bunch of sticks and voila, a few years later the multi-million dollar Blair Witch franchise was born. Thanks to a combination of gullibility and wanting to appear cultured and artsy, Americans ate up the whole “found footage” genre that birthed several generations of movies that made way more money than they deserved.
The latest brown stain on the undergarment of the “found footage” epidemic is Apollo 18, a film about three astronauts who encounter the head crabs from Halo, Half-Life 2, The Thing, Cloverfield, numerous other titles, on the moon. They then come down with a case of crazy followed by a case of dead. Most of it is done through security camera footage in an attempt to be gritty and realistic, although we know the true reason: lack of money.
Pictured: a case of 'dead.'
Anyway, instead of doing a specific review of Apollo 18 I’ve decided that the best approach is to simply review the entire “found footage” genre. Mostly because I’m a renaissance man but also because the movie follows every genre cliché so diligently that it might as well have been copying and pasting from everything that's come before it. And don’t whine about spoilers. Like I said Apollo 18 is so formulaic that these are about as spoilerish as telling you that if you still have Star Wars sheets by age 30 that you'll die alone.
Cliché #1: Killing every character.
I know that’s actually a pretty fucking big spoiler, especially since I dickishly put it at the top of the list, but when every character dies in a “found footage” film it essentially screams: “We could not think of a way to properly end this movie.” This happens in Apollo 18, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project, and probably a lot more than I can't think of at the moment. While the directors see this as “creative” in that they hope it will invoke a feeling of dread and despair to the viewer, it really invokes a feeling of fuck you. What this says is that the writers couldn’t think of a way to end it so they copped out at the last minute in a last-ditch effort to make the film emotionally compelling, which may have worked once or twice but when every character is walking around with an “I Am Going to Die” sticker attached to their forehead then the effect loses any weight.
Cliché #2: Shaking the camera around to hide the shitty special effects.
Another cost-cutting measure that these films take is wildly shaking the camera like it’s being operated by Michael J. Fox after a double shot of espresso. Cloverfield did this shit so much that movie theaters actually posted signs apologizing for it. When the theater has to apologize for the shittiness of your movie beforehand, then you have a problem. While Apollo 18 does have a fair amount of creepy still shots, when the astronauts decide to head outside it’s like whoever’s holding the camera suddenly had a mouse run up his pant leg. Once again, you directors think that this is supposed to invoke a feeling of genuineness, but we all know the truth…
Pictured: a case of 'fuck you.'
Cliché #3: Trying to convince us that it’s a true story.
Shut the fuck up, Hollywood producers. The only people gullible enough to believe you are those that have pet chickens in trailer parks with Confederate flags taped irresponsibly over their rear windshields. While you think you’re immersing your audience into the experience, you’re really just making those of us with working brains feel insulted that you’d lump us into the same category as stupid children who still believe in Santa Claus. When someone tells an unbelievable story, the worst thing they can do is try to convince everyone that it actually happened, because then it just makes you look like a douche instead of a visionary.
Cliché #4: Barely showing your monsters.
Well excuse me, Apollo 18, for thinking that your alien movie would actually have some fucking aliens in it. I guess I was thrown off by that big velociraptor footprint on the poster. Instead we get the usual brand of “found footage” horror shots of cameras suddenly going off or people getting dragged from behind into craters. You know, the same bullshit we’ve seen in every fucking one of these movies ever. Leave some innovation for the rest of us, Hollywood! The only monsters we really get in Apollo 18 don’t show up until the last 20 minutes and are just the head crabs which have officially now appeared in more films than Leonardo DiCaprio and fleeting glances of shadowy things that really look more bored than menacing. Which brings us to our next point…
The head crab monsters (seen to the right) are experimenting with indy stuff, in this case moon rock monsters, so they don't lose their street cred.
Cliché #5: Being fucking boring.
Seriously, a film about aliens on the moon doesn’t have to be boring. Transformers was pretty entertaining, for what it’s worth, but Apollo 18 seems content to just dick around for an hour before actually doing anything. It’s like watching a webcam video that doesn’t involve scantily-clad women and pillow fights: it gets boring as fuck. Paranormal Activity has this scene where the scary pre-demon girl talks about her life growing up and it goes on for ten fucking minutes and falls into the we don’t fucking care territory after about 30 seconds. Well, Apollo 18 one-ups this with multiple scenes of the astronauts literally just doing nothing. Not to mention an obligatory part showing where they have a cookout for some reason in an attempt to illicit some kind of emotion.
Conclusion:
Apollo 18 is bad. The few bright spots are the focus on the claustrophobia the perils of space inevitably bring but the actual alien part of the alien movie leaves more to be desired than a blind optometrist. It thinks it’s being creative when it’s really just being pretentious, and even though I set the bar very low when it comes to alien movies, Apollo 18 still has to climb a ladder to touch the bottom of it. When your alien movie could be improved by taking the aliens out, then that's a pretty good sign that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Posted by Brent Saltzman on September 6, 2011 at 12:50 PM