Apollo 18

I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan of the found footage style of movie. I liked Paranormal Activity, I watched Blair Witch at some point and at least didn't hate it, and that's about it as far as thrillers go. There's also Chronicle, which had its good points, but it's not really a horror movie like the others, so I'm not sure it's relevant.

I had thought Apollo 18 looked interesting off the trailers, so I asked for it for Christmas. Basically, there was one more American mission to the moon than most people believe. Nate Walker (Lloyd Owen) and Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) land on the Moon, ostensibly to set up some transmitters designed to help keep and eye on the Russkies, while John Grey (Ryan Robbins) is up in the orbiter. Things quickly start going wrong. There's a lot of interference in their communications, odd noises while they sleep, the flag getting torn down and tossed aside.

Then they find a dead cosmonaut, and it becomes apparent they were sent here for other reasons, and things go downhill rapidly for them from there.

One thing I did with Paranormal Activity was watch the screen extremely closely, trying to pick up any minute sign of the ghost/demon before the big scares. Which was more fun than you might think, though it kinds of blunts the effect of said scares. I wasn't as successful with Apollo 18, partly because of the nature of the threat. A lot of times it's difficult to tell if there's anything in the background, unless the camera purposefully highlights it. Which was something I didn't entirely understand. Were the cameras they set up designed to pan across the moonscape and zoom in on any movement? If not, I'm not sure why the footage keeps zooming in at certain moments.

That's setting aside the question of how the hell anyone, government or otherwise, got ahold of the footage in the first place.

The creatures were moderately scary. I watched some of the deleted scenes and alternate endings, and they had some versions that were the size of a pig or so, those looked stupid. Probably better they left those out of the film. The little ones though, the ones that skittered about like bugs? They were creepy, because they were quick, quiet, and they could get in anywhere. I did think their goals were a little unclear. First it seemed like they just want the humans off the Moon, then it seemed to shift to simply killing them, then maybe to "We'll infect you and use you to spread it to Earth".

I'm curious how creatures accustomed to living on an airless world would survive exposure to air on the other things that would come with it. Here on Earth, we have anaerobic bacteria in geysers or undersea vents that live on hydrogen sulfides, but exposure to oxygen kills them.

I thought the actors portraying the astronauts did a good job. There's a sense of camaraderie between the three of them, that the barbecue we say them having with their families is a normal occurrence, and these guys know each other, have their own little in-jokes and such. Nate and Ben get most of the focus since they're in the thick of it, and they react to things differently. Ben gets unnerved first, but doesn't descend into complete hysteria until near the end, when things have gone really bad. In between, he pulls himself together to try and find solutions for the problems, especially as Nate gets less useful. Nate, when he starts to go, heads in a different direction. While Ben is more scared, Nate is angry, lashing out, before eventually reaching resignation. I also liked John's frustration with the orders he receives from Houston, and I love that decided to ignore them. He tried to save his friends, and fuck those guys who sent them out here to die.

Would I recommend it? If you like found footage thriller flicks, I'd say it's at least worth watching once. It's not as though you can't get a cheap copy somewhere. If that genre is not to your taste, then no. I don't think Apollo 18 is the one that's going to change your mind.