Review of Apollo 18 (2011) by Yourfavcomedion — 22 Sep 2016

For as much as I love it when a movie like this tries to get away from the usual hack and slash horror, it was a really anticlimactic movie, and nothing really EVER happened within the whole thing.

So the plot is that there was a secret Apollo mission that the government kept secret... for... reasons I guess. I read something about how they government was so paranoid that they confiscated telescopes to cover up this mission. Sounds just as reliable as today's government. Anyways, apparently the mission was just go up, collect data, gather rocks etc. Basically just do what the other Apollo missions have already done. Yet they suspect that the government is hiding something from them and so on and so on. I'd like to give more details, but I don't want to give any spoilers in case someone is bored enough to watch this.

Like I said, I like the idea of a horror movie taking place on the moon like this. You're alone, can't get help and you don't actually know what enemy you're actually facing. It's a cool concept and definitely is a better idea than most horror movies has came out with in the past decade. You see the problem is, the tension can break new heights in atmosphere and suspense in the first couple of minutes because it has a nice build up. But you see, some things actually have to happen in order for the tension to finally deliver in scaring the audience, there are a few brief seconds that the movie does come alive but it kills the pacing when we have to go back to the boring scenes of the astronauts trying to figure out what's going on. It totally killed the movie for me, and when it seemed like the movie MIGHT have delivered with some "scary scenes" at the end, I was just to bored to actually care what was going on, I just wanted the movie to end.

The characters are not really explained at all, there is hardly any back story for any of the characters. From what I remember from off the top of my head, there was only one scene that talked about the astronauts past, and that was about a party and them having a conversation how they might of had "to many beers." Other then that only for one character, it explains that he has a wife and a daughter to get back home to. It would be forgivable if I didn't summarize the whole back story in this one paragraph. Not to mention one of the nit picks I'd like to say before I sum this up, is the cameras in here were awful. It was such a poor design choice to make the movie like this, I can understand that it's scarier if you don't know what exactly is chasing you, but I feel like I got motion sickness from watching this movie.

So overall, a really cool idea, and the movie does come alive for a FEW seconds, before it goes back towards the boring atmosphere that never really delivers. At the end it would seem a little scary but the movie has so much build up of what is actually going to happen, that you just end up sleepy in your seat when the event does happen later in the movie. You want to fix it, have more interesting characters with better back stories so that way we can relate to them. Deliver better with your scary moments instead of just building up the tension again, again and again so that your audience doesn't fall asleep by the screaming. Please, please fix the stupid camera, it's one of the worst recorded movies I've ever seen.