* * * (out of five) Apollo 18. Written by Brian Miller & Cory Goodman. Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego.
America's mass semi-bored shrug over the exploration of space is pretty much summed up by critical reaction to Gonzalo López-Gallego's nifty new thriller, Apollo 18. "A zero intensity space-bore" says some guy from Movie.com; "Watching people land on the moon isn't all that interesting," declares another guy from Slant (sorry, not Slate) magazine. "In space, no one can hear you yawn," random dude from someplace called "Total Film" quips, showing his mom that he is a very clever dude indeed.
Now everyone is entitled to his opinion. Nor is it very useful for a reviewer to waste (much) time reviewing other reviews. But there does seem to be something strange going on here--a collective yawn at a technological miracle that was once routine, circa 1968-1972, but sure isn't routine anymore. Russia never managed to send a manned mission to the Moon. The vaunted Chinese still can't, though at their current rate of progress they might get there in fifteen to twenty years. And as America's recent troubles with her (now defunct) Constellation program attest, it's not even clear we could go back to really explore the Moon, even if we could somehow summon the vision to do so.
In fact, the only places where all that Apollo lunar landing stuff really is yawn-worthy is at the movies, and in computer/online games. When going to "a galaxy far, far away" already seems old hat, a mere trip to the Moon sounds like pretty small beer. Stress goes on the seems, because it bears emphasizing, o ye net-heads, that movies and games are just bits and bytes and have nothing to do with the sloppy, wholly analog, spam-in-a-can reality of flying in space. A child of the internet age who declares "watching people land on the moon isn't all that interesting" is about as crazy as a guy who has mastered Madden Football announcing that the Super Bowl--the real one--isn't all that tough to win. He's like the supposedly badass lieutenant in Aliens who had tons of combat experience--all in simulations.
Apollo 18 is a "found-footage" fakeumentary in the style of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, et al. The conceit this time is that there was an extra Apollo mission to the Moon, and that this movie was assembled out of hitherto "lost" footage from the secret flight. The astronauts (Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen, and Ryan Robbins) went along with the secrecy, not even telling their families about where they're going, for the privilege of being the first to stand on the lunar South Pole. Naturally, the mission was covert for a reason, which the guys discover when a pair of extra footprints turn up in the lunar dust not far from their spacecraft.
Go into this movie expecting to watch space soldiers battle aliens and you're bound to be let down. What newcomer López-Gallego and writers Brian Miller and Cory Goodman actually mean to deliver here, and entirely succeed in delivering, is a moody, haunted house movie. After all, hearing unexplained bumps in the night in an empty house is one thing, but hearing them on a dead planet is quite another. What horror there is comes not in bloody spurts, but in the slow death of the characters' faith in their routine, in the system.
Indeed, trying to make whole story out of just three (really, two) characters, crammed in a lunar module the size of a walk-in closet, is fairly ambitious in itself--sort of like that novelist a few years ago who wrote an entire book without using the letter "e". The pleasure lies not in how good it is compared to more conventional thrillers, but in watching someone pull off the challenge. The way the filmmakers have done their homework on the real Apollo program, right down to the comm lingo and mission patches, also serves the mood.
Aside from how "boring" López-Gallego's movie is, the most common complaint was that these characters aren't likeable. True, during its entire 86 minutes not a single one of them kisses a puppy. But in fact, these guys are no more or less sympathetic than any of the real Apollo-era astronauts, who were all white-bread types all drawn from the small, strictly non-diverse world of elite test pilots. Indeed, it is one of more perverse pleasures of footage from those old Apollo missions (the real ones, that is) is watching those rock-solid, square-jawed, deathly-dull guys suddenly try to switch on the eloquence when confronted with soul-stirring cosmic wonders. An astronaut on the first flight around the Moon, Apollo 8, once reflected on infinity by speaking of "the big vastness of space". In short, López-Gallego's fictional astronauts might be dull, but they're exactly what they should be.
Apollo 18 isn't a crowd pleaser like Apollo 13. It doesn't give us instantly likeable stars like Tom Hanks; it doesn't let us get to know the astronauts' wives (though really, who ever really cares about the astronaut's wife?). As someone who tends to like the "found footage" subgenre of thriller, it worked well enough for this space cadet. If you don't, feel free to subtract a star and go back to your X-Box.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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