Apollo 18

LOVEFiLM Review Apollo 18

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  By Tom Charity from LOVEFiLM

  Why make a found footage faux documentary if you are going to cut the thing as if it's a Hollywood action movie?

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Most helpful review Apollo 18

• Worst film of the year.

   

  By TanujDua (6 reviews) from Oxford/Nottingham, England , 09 Sep 2011

  [Highly rated reviewer]

  Want to know one film to avoid? Not only in the cinema but on DVD/Blu-ray too? Well this is that film! The trailer actually makes the film seem okay, a cheesy predictable cheap horror that tries to establish that the apparently cancelled Apollo 18 mission really went ahead, and the footage from that mission is what’s featured in the film.
  
  It actually looks good, all of the footage used is grainy, old, seems as though it was shot back in the 60s. The colours are what you’d expect to see on an old camera, dull, but I’m pretty sure the Moon is a pretty dull place. Lots of shaky cam as well since a good chunk of the footage was apparently shot on handheld cameras by the astronauts/cosmonauts themselves. In fact it seemed to be shot in a style extremely similar to The Blair Witch Project. That’s fine, if done well. The acting was horrendous. The characters didn’t feel like real people, who were really in space and in danger. You didn’t care about them at all, didn’t care about whether they’d live or die. Couple this with the fact that it’s so boring.
  
  The danger that they (the astronauts) encounter, which is pretty much ruined in the trailer, is pathetic. Before seeing the film I thought it had potential, I like films like this, ones that have a few characters and start out slow but build up the tension. Films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Sadly Apollo 18, while sharing many of the similarities with those films doesn’t have the same build up up of tension throughout the first part before releasing a wave of screams at the end. I’m definitely a fan of scary films, whether they be a slasher type film (like Scream) or a more tension driven film (like Paranormal Activity). This just isn’t any of those. It tries to be, that is evident, but it just fails on nearly every single level. As I said earlier the actual style of the film is probably the best, most well part of it.
  
  I wonder how director Gonzalo López-Gallego, who hasn’t directed anything I’ve heard of (most of it’s Spanish) feels about all of the negativity the film has received. The 3 main astronauts (and really the only 3 people who do anything in the film) are also relatively unknown, at least they haven’t been in anything worth remembering.
  
  Overall I’ll give this film a big fat don’t watch! Ever. It’s painfully boring and even though a lot of bad horror films turn out to be funny, this didn’t. The joint the worst film of the year (along with Your Highness).

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