Tags:
Film: Apollo 18
Year: 2011
Director: Gonzalo López-Gallego
Writer: Brian Miller
Starring: Warren Christie, Ryan Robbins and Ali Liebert
Review:
This film begins giving background information about the United States Apollo missions to the moon and giving the history of the US landing on the moon. At the end of it are claims that there was a secret Apollo 18 mission that no one knew about until the footage was unloaded onto a website called Lunar Truth. The film is supposed to be edited from that footage.
The mission has three men. Two astronauts who are actually going to land on the moon are played by Warren Christie and Lloyd Owen. The third is their pilot who will stay in a spaceship that will orbit the moon until the two are done and he will take them back to Earth. He is played by Ryan Robbins.
While they are going about their mission collecting samples they discover footprints that are not their own. They follow them to a Russian spaceship that is very similar to the ship they use, but the Russians supposedly didn’t land on the moon. Inside a nearby crater, Christie discovers the body of a cosmonaut. Freaked out, they return to their ship.
They wake up one day and Owen goes out to check on something. While he is out, he’s attacked by something that is similar to a giant spider. Christie notices Owen is bleeding when he comes back in. When he investigates, he finds that something is under the skin of Owen. He pulls it out and it becomes a rock. While Christie is looking at it, Owen destroys it and we hear a similar scream we’ve heard throughout the film.
Will they be able to escape before it is too late? Owen is also infected with something from the alien as well, will he survive or will this infection kill him?
This is filmed similar to Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead. It is done in hand held so the camera is shaky, but it makes you feel like you’re there. With that said though, this film is kind of boring, which is odd because it is so short. The horror is there and the jumps are as well, but for some reason it just drags out.
The acting isn’t bad, but we don’t really understand what is going on and we don’t learn what is either. Just that there are aliens on the moon that pretend to be rocks and can infect us with something. I usually don’t like films to spell everything out and leave it up to me, but I believe this one just leaves too much out.
I would recommend giving this a view to make your own judgment. I thought it was okay, but it definitely could have been better. It is still an okay watch, but the mix of horror and sci-fi, there is definitely better things out there to watch in this genre than this one.
My Rating: 6 out of 10