Paranormal and Revolutionary Activities

Tea House (1914) by Aleksey Isupov, 

from the Savitsky Collection.

*  *  * (out of five stars)  The Desert of Forbidden Art. Written and directed by Tchavdar Georgiev and  Amanda Pope. 

* * 1/2   Paranormal Activity 3. Written by Christoper B. Landon. Directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman.

The suppression of a single significant artistic voice is a tragedy. The suppression of an entire generation of voices is a cataclysm. The record of the Soviet Union in this regard is whatever is worse than “cataclysm”—the deliberate, systematic, and pitiless purging of whole fields of artistic endeavor, liquidated because they had no place in the regime’s ideological narrative of “liberation” (that’s doublespeak for “enslavement”). In Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope’s extraordinary documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art, (available now on Netflix) we get a glimpse of what the world missed under Stalin and his cronies.

            Much of the art that never saw the light of day under the Soviets has landed in an remarkable museum located not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but in the provincial town of Nukus, Uzbekistan. The museum, formally called Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art, is the brainchild of an extraordinary collector named Igor Savitsky, a failed painter who devoted his life to preserving the artistic legacy his nation would not. Over the course of decades, Savitsky collected some 40,000 paintings, prints, and other pieces of visual art, funding his acquisitions with tacit help of certain individuals in the regional government of Karakalpakstan. The paradoxical result is that one of Russia’s greatest collections of Russian avant garde art isn’t in Russia. A hypothetic equivalent might be encountering one of the world’s best collections of Monets, Manets and Renoirs not in Paris, but in a second-tier regional capital in southern Algeria.

            Indeed, many of the banned, imprisoned, or otherwise ignored artists had some connection with that poor, remote region, where European and central Asian cultural crosscurrents met and intermingled. So while the Savitsky’s cause was worthy just in a moral sense, the film very clearly shows that this is emphatically not a case of artworks celebrated because they were suppressed. In paintings by Alexander Volkov, Alexander Nikolayev, and Mikhail Kurzin, we are looking at the Goyas and Gauguins and Daumiers of their time. With stunning vividness, they demonstrate that principle—dangerous to the Soviets’ highly Russocentric ideology—that there was much the country’s “backward” Islamic underbelly could teach their overlords in Moscow.

            Aesthetically, The Desert of Forbidden Art is a revelation. But it also shows that an individual like Savitsky—a man who was, quite frankly, a nobody—could make a profound difference, even in the face of the worst tyranny in a century of tyrannies. 

*  *  *

I’m still a fan of Oren Peli’s 2007 Paranormal Activity, a faux home-movie creep-fest about a suburban couple tormented by a demon. Like demons, sequels are can be hard to get rid of, though you can try to ignore them (as this critic did Paranormal Activity 2 last year). The original Activity, after all, was the essence of a sleeper: a low-key, atmospheric horror at a time when virtually nothing was being left to the CGI equipment between our ears. Boosting the budget—and the expectations—doesn’t seem to add much to this particular premise.

            Great word of mouth drew me into Activity 3—a prequel set back in the 1980’s, when the haunted Katie (Katie Featherston) was first visited by her personal demon. At first, young Katie (Chloe Csengery) isn’t really frightened out by her new friend, whom, in a possible reference Tobe Hooper’s infamous 1982 haunting movie, Poltergeist, she calls “Toby”. Mom (Lauren Bittner) is content to indulge the “imaginary friend” thing, but live-in boyfriend and video geek Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) is determined to get all those bumps in the night securely on tape. Katie’s fate is not exactly a matter of suspense here, as she obviously lives on to appear in the other movies. Poor Dennis and his honking, ‘80’s-vintage tape deck? Not so lucky.

            Though there too many cheap shots, there are also a few genuine jolts. A scene where “Toby” makes creative use of a sheet—Halloween ghost style—is creepily funny, and niftily shot by directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who (or more precisely, have their character Dennis) mount their camera on an oscillating fan. The fundamental conceit of the Paranormal series—mating primitive video with the visceral kick of modern sound technology—still packs some power. But the script by Christopher B. Landon takes the story in a vaguely Rosemary’s Baby-ish direction that undoes the beguiling simplicity of the original.

            At the risk of spoilers, nothing more specific can be said about how this movie doesn’t relate to what is supposed to come later. Suffice it to say that coming out of PA 3, we’re not relishing our survival—we’re scratching our heads. And while “Toby” himself might thrive on confusion, that’s not the best place for horror to live.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro  

The Old Gringo

Sam Shepard makes a legal withdrawal in Blackthorn.

* * 1/2  Blackthorn. Written by Miguel Barros. Directed by Mateo Gil.

The only desert in Europe that looks anything like the American Southwest is in Spain, near Almeria in the lee of the Sierra Nevada mountains (the original Sierra Nevadas, that is). Sergio Leone made his spaghetti Westerns there in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and it’s another reason why—in the addition to the obvious historical connections between Spain and the old West—that the Spanish have a bigger stake in this quintessentially American genre than, say, your typical Belgian. Little surprise, then, that a Spanish director and a Spanish screenwriter have taken up a challenge Hollywood probably would never accept today—to make a credible sequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

            More properly, Blackthorn is an “alternative history”, the premise being that Butch (real name, Robert LeRoy Parker) survived that 1908 gunfight with the Bolivian army. In the script by Miguel Barros, Butch (Sam Shepard) has lived out the twenty years since his alleged death in quiet semi-retirement under the alias “James Blackthorn”. By 1927 he’s hankering for home, and decides to cash in his Bolivian property for a ticket out. Along the way, however, he runs into a shifty Spanish geologist (Eduardo Noreiga) who costs him his bankroll, but offers in compensation a stash of loot he stole from a crooked mining company. His bridges burned, Blackthorn has no choice but to hope the Spaniard is telling the truth. (Hint—he is, but only in part.)

            To get any enjoyment out of Blackthorn you ought not expect anything remotely as fun as George Roy Hill’s original, Paul Newman/Robert Redford Butch Cassidy (1969). Although that film was on equally shaky historical ground, it became a classic for its unique combination of romping fun and piquant wistfulness for the end of the West’s heroic era. Director Matteo Gil (who wrote the scripts for Agora and Vanilla Sky) nails the wistfulness, for sure, but Blackthorn is more a low-key slog than a romp. The gristled, copiously maned Sam Shepard, who perhaps resembles Mr. Mephistopheles from Cats more than either Newman or the historical Butch, has undeniable presence. His performance, however, is no more fun than one of his celebrated post-modernist plays (e.g., Buried Child, True West). The sole exception: a wry scene where Blackthorn, the career bank robber, makes a legal withdrawal from a Bolivian bank.

            Even if they preferred to turn the normally talkative Cassidy into a taciturn old goat, Gil and Barros could have made his temporary sidekick, Noreiga, a bit more colorful, a bit more than just a desk jockey who goes stealthily corrupt. They need not have gone for the full, scene-chewing Eli Wallach, but some basis for camaraderie, some reason for the old Butch to ride again with a worthy partner, might have made Blackthorn more engaging. As it is, they don’t, so it isn’t.

            There are moments of undeniable visual poetry here. The locations in the Bolivian high country, and in the towns Butch himself might have known, are stunning, evoking the U.S. west but also unique in their way. Gil deploys them beautifully, suggesting by topography alone that Butch’s heyday is not exactly gone, but transformed. He also offers up some flashbacks to the better-known episodes from the boys’ pre-Bolivian days, with Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as the young Butch, and the ravishing Dominique McElligott as an updated, swashbuckling version of Etta, the distaff corner of the amicable love triangle played by Katherine Ross in the ’69 version. These scenes are too brief to amount to much, but they do suggest that, in the right hands, a reboot of the full legend could be non-embarrassing after all.

            No question that Gil and Barros have channeled the spirit of the old Butch. His final reckoning with the Spaniard, who stands in for the old aristocratic kleptocracy, is fully in the spirit of the outlaw’s Robin Hood ethic of only stealing from one-percenters like Mr. E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad Company. It’s just too bad Blackthorn doesn’t give us the jam with the bread.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

The Wings of Woman

Margot Robbie is ready for take off in Pan Am.

* * (out of five stars) Pan Am. Created by Jack Orman. On ABC, Sundays at 10pm.

The old Eastern Airlines used to call itself “The Wings of Man”, but that might just as well have been the slogan of America’s unofficial flagship carrier, Pan Am. At a time when air travel was still largely the prerogative of the well-to-do, Pan Am exemplified the privilege and exoticism of the early air age. Headquartered in a massive New York skyscraper that literally sat athwart the symbol of old-style travel—Grand Central Terminal—Pan Am inaugurated many of the standard features of the business, including pressurized cabins, jet engines, wide-body aircraft, and computerized reservations. When American GIs flew commercial from Vietnam, they were booked on Pan Am. Such a powerful symbol of American enterprise aloft did it become that when Stanley Kubrick wanted a corporate logo for his fictional space shuttle in 2001, Pan Am’s blue globe was the logical choice. Alas, the airline itself never lived to sell trips to space, filing for bankruptcy in 1991.

            Pan Am was “the wings of man” is another, spicier sense, for it had some now-notorious criteria for employment as flight attendants (or, as they were once known, “stewardesses”). These women had to be younger than thirty-two, single, and adhere to certain standards of appearance, including mandatory corsets and weight limits.  Going “wide-body” was a discipline-worthy offense. That, and the rule against marriage, were clearly designed to appeal to the airline’s core customer—the businessman with the martini and the skinny tie, probably married himself, but desperately attuned to possibilities of sexual adventure on the road.

            The gender politics sound antediluvian, but as ABC’s new series Pam Am tries to show, the job had its compensations. As one of the show’s “core four” characters, Christina Ricci’s Maggie, tells a beatnik friend, “You may not have to see the world to change it, but I do.” That’s the premise of the series, and its potential appeal—to show how, in what seems like a career posing as eye-candy, some women seized the opportunity to educate themselves, and maybe muss the skinny ties of the patriarchy in the process. “How do you keep ‘em down in the typing pool when they’ve seen Paris?” Pan Am wonders. Better shows have been based on less.

            Three episodes in, though, the theory still sounds better than the reality. The show has its retro appeal, to be sure: like Mad Men, it finds poignance, and even some charm, in the pre-ironic futurism of the early sixties. In the pilot episode, the Pan Am building (with its rooftop heliport, now defunct) and the Pan Am Terminal (now the Delta Terminal) at JFK get the full CGI treatment, restored to their antique glories like the Forum in Gladiator. The glamor takes off as the four girls (Ricci, Margot Robbie, Karine Vanasse and Kelli Gardner) cross the terminal like cat-walking models, their tight sky-blue uniforms set off with crisp white gloves. In this, someone has clearly done their homework—nobody, except maybe the 1970’s Avon Lady, ambulates so unnaturally without training, hips swinging and arms cocked upward like a swan boat in skirts.

            But it’s obvious that Pan Am is not Mad Men as soon as the characters open their mouths. When someone declares, “They’re a new breed of woman! They just have an impulse to take flight. So don’t ground ‘em!”—the phrase on the nose doesn’t really cover the awkwardness. As HBO and the other premium cable networks have shown, though the CGI and the period-perfect details can be fun, there just no substitute for the writing. This series is going nowhere without it.

            The major networks reportedly got a deluge of concepts for similar “gurl power” shows after the publication of Hanna Rosin’s much-discussed Atlantic Monthly 2010 article “The End of Men.” In it, Rosin charts the decline and fall of the American male from his position of dominance in almost every field of endeavor, to his current state of wretchedness, where he lags behind his sisters in his prospects. “Is the post-industrial society simply better suited to women?” asks The Atlantic. The question is rhetorical, because with the decline of US manufacturing, construction, defense—in short, all the fields where males have tended to predominate—the men have disproportionately suffered. True, the guys still control the upper echelons in government and big business, but as Rosin argues, the glass ceiling is showing some cracks. Pretty soon the historic role reversal will be complete, with the “house-husbands” staying home to raise the kids and their wives out running the world. Our fascination with the early ‘60’s therefore presents a “two-fer”—a way for downsized men to indulge their nostalgia for the gin-and-tonic patriarchy, and for women to revisit the dawn of the Age of Woman. Mad Men, after all, is as much about Peggy and Joan as it is about Don Draper.

            Rosin’s thesis has struck a deep chord, but it may still be wrong. While it may be true that, for instance, more women are getting college degrees than men now, it’s also true that college degrees aren’t exactly the keys to the executive washroom anymore. If women are gaining in the workplace, it’s because the workplace is a lot less rewarding that it used to be. If women are more highly valued for their “consensus-building” social skills, maybe it’s because “get along, go-along” types are a lot easier to serve pink slips than alpha males.

            What Rosin sees as a historic shift in gender relations is really just the cherry on top of a shit sundae of bad economic prospects. To adapt a phrase, of the two genders, the female is the best-looking horse in the glue factory. So what’s worse than a job as a glorified waitress obliged to wear a girdle? Maybe no job at all.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro            

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Nazi-Hunter

Chastain and Worthington, washed out in The Debt.

* *  1/2 (out of five) The Debt. Written by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman & Peter Straughan. Directed by John Madden. 

You can feel the taboo emanating from the tight knot of memes comprising “genocide,” “Nazis”, “Jews” “terrorism”. and “Israel”. But like any taboo object, handling it is perfectly safe when done according to the proper procedures. At the movies, Stephen Spielberg did it quite effectively in Schindler’s List (1993), but this bought him no credit against the howls of outrage that greeted Munich (2005), when he dared suggest a degree of moral ambiguity in Israel’s campaign for vengeance against Palestinian terrorists. (To my mind, Munich is the more courageous work.) For the most part, the sanctimoniousness surrounding these issues just forces everyone to put the whole mess in a special category of non-polite conversation, which has the ironic effect of making it easier to forget.

              I wouldn’t call John Madden’s The Debt a particularly courageous work. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “good” either, at least in any consistent sense. Its quality, like its courage, comes intermittently. Based on a 2007 Israeli film of the same name, it is the story of three Mossad agents who, in 1965, attempted to kidnap a former SS concentration camp doctor, a certain Dr. Bernhardt (Jesper Christensen), from Soviet-occupied East Berlin. By all public accounts, the mission resulted in Bernhardt’s death, elevating the agents, Rachel, Stephan and David (Helen Mirren, Tim Wilkinson and Ciarán Hinds) to the status of national heroes.  But thirty years later, disturbing stories that things might not have gone as reported have surfaced. David steps in front of a moving truck rather than face the possibility that Bernardt is not dead after all, and Rachel finds she must go into the field again to redeem a decades’ old lie.

            Though Mirren is biggest star, the film spends most of its time in a long flashback to 1965, following the travails of the agents’ younger selves (Jessica Chastain, Marton Czokas and Sam Worthington, respectively). The flashback has the appropriate feel to it, with the cold, perpetually gray atmosphere of an old-time Cold War espionage thriller. The flame-haired Chastain (The Tree of Life) is literally the only splash of color, and it is she, not Mirren, who becomes the heart of the movie. As Bernhardt has gone into practice as a gynecologist (alas, ex-Nazis never become something neutral and boring, like ear, nose and throat men) Rachel must pose as a patient in his office. Her visceral, barely-concealed disgust at putting her feet in the stirrups for him, and the way Christensen ups the creepiness factor by playing the scenes with pure bland geniality, is The Debt’s one notable horror.

            When dealing with this kind of thing, dispensing justice to Nazis, there is indeed some courage in suggesting the truths behind Israel’s formative myths—like America’s—are not as simple as we’d all like to believe. But The Debt throws it all away with a final encounter between the nonagenarian Bernhardt and the septuagenarian Rachel whose preposterousness is exceeded only by its clumsiness. Think  of your grandmother in a blood-soaked brawl with a department store mannequin. Or, if you prefer, don’t.

            Director Madden, responsible for such middle-brow favorites as Shakespeare in Love and Mrs. Brown, isn’t exactly known for edgy drama. To get away with a truly subversive portrayal of Nazi-hunting takes a braver talent, someone like John le Carré. But not even le Carré would necessarily get away with it unscathed.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

Bits vs. Bugs

* * * (out of five) Contagion. Written by Scott Z. Burns. Directed by Stephen Soderbergh. 

Jude Law is worse than the plague in Contagion.

With all the bad news going around lately, anybody can be excused for lacking appetite for yet another apocalyptic disaster movie. Hollywood has killed the world so many times already, with zombies and aliens and demons and cyborgs and vampires and global warming and nukes, that the whole thing seems rather old hat. A viral epidemic than kills only a few hundred million people, like in Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion? Please get back to us when you’ve got something serious!

            Having finally gotten around to seeing Contagion, though, I can report that even modest mishaps can have their compensations. For this film resembles Soderbergh’s own Traffic (2000) more than a conventional disaster movie—that is, a sweeping drama featuring many big-name actors in tiny roles, each filling in a piece of a picture that comes out larger than the sum of its parts. This time we have Matt Damon as a father crazed with worry for his (as yet) uninfected daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron), and Lawrence Fishburne as a government bureaucrat crazed with worry for his infected co-worker (Kate Winslet), and Jude Law (terrific here) as a blogger-huckster who profits directly from spreading disinformation about the virus that’s eating the world. We also have Marion Cotillard as a World Health Organization investigator who is abducted by the Chinese, and Jennifer Ehle as the CDC scientist willing to do anything to stop the plague, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the unfortunate “Patient Zero”.

            With the exception of Damon, whose portrait of a man whose world has fallen apart is the heart of the story, none of these performances add up to more than ten minutes of screen time. Nor is much of this particularly scary—at least not in a visceral, “flesh-eating virus” sense.Instead, Soderbergh aims for, and gets, disquieting drama that builds in tiny, deadly increments.

            A less perceptive script, for instance, would start to round things down when the vaccine is finally discovered. This is not a spoiler here, though, because  as Scott Z. Burn’s screenplay shows, the invention of the vaccine is only the beginning of the end, and a very tentative beginning at that. And indeed, Soderbergh may have pioneered something here that adds up to a truly weird creature: a “pandemic procedural”. Don’t know what do when viral hybridization jumps your R-nought from 2 to 4? Can’t find your index patient? Wondering how to handle the press when setting up social distancing? Contagion is your education.

            As Burns’ screenplay notes, respect for the probability of the next global plague has been undermined by too many false alarms—too many bird flus and H1N1’s that leave behind more hysterical headlines than corpses. What these “shoes that didn’t drop” actually suggest, however, is that fast as viruses can mutate and spread, they just can’t compete with the spread of information that helps us keep ahead of them. It has been said that earthquakes don’t kill people—houses falling down in earthquakes kill people. Similarly, it’s not the bugs that make pandemics, but ignorance. In this sense, the idea that some super-virus can wipe out billions of people in the age of the internet may be as fanciful as invading cyborgs from the Moon.

            Meanwhile, we can give thanks for Contagion, a movie that reminds us that there’s still power in the merely cataclysmic.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

Drive Already

* * 1/2 (out of five stars)  Drive. Written by Hossein Amini, based on a novel by James Sallis. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. 

Ryan Gosling, not driving in Drive.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive comes off the line impressively. A man (Ryan Gosling) sits behind the wheel of a getaway car, suffering through a silent, tense wait as two other guys rob a warehouse. The police are already on the way when they finally get going. Slipping into the night, the driver engages the cops on a moving chess match through the streets of downtown LA as the thieves sweat out the ordeal in the back seat. But when the heat gets too close, the driver just pulls into the garage at the Staples Center and calmly walks away, leaving his clients to their fate.

            The scene, which is superbly cut and paced, lasts five minutes, and features not a single word of spoken dialog. It’s terrific, but alas, it’s all a colossal tease, because like a new car that excels only during the test drive, Refn’s film is all downhill from there.

            Gosling’s character is known here only as “Driver”. He’s a mystery man with Formula One racing skills and ice-water in his veins. Like that other “Man with No Name”, Driver came from nowhere, has no friends, chews a toothpick, and doles out his words like a miser forced to hand out Kruggerrands. Truth to tell, he’s desperately cool in that Steve McQueen, dorm-room poster sort of way, with an attitude about human connection typified by his longest speech in the movie: “If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. Either side of that five minutes, you’re on your own.”  

            Trouble is, dorm-room posters aren’t enough to sustain a whole movie. Screenwriter Hossein Amini (Jude, The Wings of the Dove) has to give Driver some trace of compassion—in this case, for Irene, a young single mother (Carey Mulligan, at full dimple) who lives in his apartment building. Irene has a young son Driver kind of likes too, going so far as to offer him one of his precious toothpicks.  Unfortunately, she also has a convict husband (Oscar Isaac) who comes home early with a lot of prison debt to work off. Driver’s inevitable attempt to free the husband—and therefore Irene—from his past gets him involved in a heist that he can’t walk away from after five minutes.

            None of this is necessarily bad, though the way it unfolds is as predictable as a red light following a green. Nor are any of the ancillary players, including Albert Brooks as a noxious small-time gangster or Bryan Cranston as Driver’s hard-luck business partner, particular liabilities. The problem is that there’s too much preposterous gang-banger stuff, too many skulls stoved in by heavy boots and forks stuck in eye-sockets. Being a terrific driver, after all, doesn’t make you a ninja, and it doesn’t need to make you as ornery as Joe Pesci crushing guys with a car door. Driver actually admits he’s good at one only thing: “I don't carry a gun... I drive.” So why isn’t that enough?  And why is the ultimate measure of an American male’s devotion how many bones he’s ready to pulverize?

            The logic fairy apparently took a few naps while Amini was penning the screenplay. Having Driver administer a beat-down to a wise-guy in a strip club, in full view of God and the girls and everybody, is worth an eyebrow raise. But it becomes truly absurd in the context of a later scene, when he takes the trouble to don a mask to murder another guy—on a deserted beach. I guess Driver is more concerned with incriminating witnesses when they happen to be hermit crabs, not strippers

            Reyn, who made the cult hit Bronson, makes visuals with a theatrical flair reminiscent of Michael Mann (Heat, Public Enemies). How disappointing, then, that Refn never gets back to the elegant road poetry he promised in the opening scene. The second or third time Driver metes out street-justice on somebody, we wonder if he’ll ever just put down that hammer and drive.

            In perhaps their last chance to have any fun with this premise, Refn and Amini are offered a golden opportunity to resurrect a classic when they have Driver steal a Mustang for his next job. But the ensuing chase—the second and last in the movie—is not only unremarkable, but shows no awareness of Steve McQueen’s Mustang chasing that Challenger through the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. That’s a missed opportunity so painful it deserves a ticket.

            This movie is called Drive, and their character is called Driver, but these filmmakers just aren’t interested in driving.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

Moon Dance

* * * (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