Review of Apollo 18 (2011) by Mike C — 26 Jan 2012

Ground control to Major Tom... Wow, this movie is taking a lot of heat. I understand it is fairly pointless. I understand it's a rip-off of hidden-footage movies like Paranormal Activity, only set in space. So? Tree of Life is an Oscar nominee for Best Picture. This movie is still three times better than that one.

The premise is simple enough: three astronauts are sent on a secret space mission to the moon. This is not entirely implausible. Do you really trust the government? Hell no. So the premise is not faulty. I didn't think the acting was particularly bad either. What can they do? The footage is choppy and they're confined to tight spaces and don't have a lot of story to build up emotion. The dialogue is not real bad either. There are flaws here and there, but at least they kept this short at just 86 minutes. How many bad movies go 90 minutes-plus just for the sake of doing it?

Overall, I wouldn't have rented this anyway. I have no interest in many space and/or alien movies. To this movie's credit, the aliens were not man-like. That's actually a huge step in ET movies. The life on other planets somehow always has man-like qualities, and that's just really small thinking. So the hidden footage concept has been overused, and may even be abused by this movie. Oh well. It's not a terrible watch and I got through it I think without even yawning at 2 am.