Apollo 18 (2011)

Director: Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego
Genre: Sci-fi/ Horror/ Thriller
Cast: Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen, Ryan Robbins
Certificate Rating: 15
Rating: 2/5

There's a reason why we've never been back to the moon.



Decades-old found footage from NASA's abandoned Apollo 18 mission, where two American astronauts were sent on a secret expedition, reveals the reason why the U.S. has never returned to the moon.

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Now this movie really intrigued me as I'm fascinated by the Moon and the Universe, I think it's a magnificent thing to learn about with the fact that it's so unknown, and the fact that it was set in space and it's a horror movie totally made me want to watch it. I mean from the plot summary it makes you wonder "What is out there?" Before I was expecting it to be scary and clearly from the tag line was expecting some scary extra terrestrial creature to be the cause of the problem.  Well extra terrestrial creature was sort of right but not necessarily what I was expecting (which can be good) although they are creepy and I would not want to be in the astronaut's "moon boots" but it just wasn't what I was expecting the movie to be.

One thing I really liked about the film was that it stuck to the conventions of horror and sci-fi when dealing with sound. The only sound we truly hear in this movie is the technical elements from the space ship as well as the static as the astronaut's communicate between one another and the people back down on Earth. Other than that the film is pretty much silent like we expect space to be.
One thing I found very stereotypical was the feud between the U.S. and Russia (or USSR) as it is set during the Cold War specifically the 1970's. It seemed very typical that the American's job was to go up there and plant detectors to prevent any future attack from the USSR, yet when they are on the moon and things begin to get weird they find a USSR space ship and a dead Russian which hints at the Americans being higher up on the social scale to the Russians who are initially the enemy.

The creatures are the weirdest things about this movie and are also, in my opinion, a bit of a let down. Imagine rocks and spiders had mutant babies (yes a weird combination) that is what these creatures look like. But what I really want to know is how did the creatures get inside the suits? Surely if the creatures ripped the suits the astronauts would be dead (from what we're told about space having no oxygen) and I can't imagine the creatures seeping through the suits (because they're made out of rock). These unanswered questions really bug me! I'm also glad this movie didn't go with the conventional alien/martian idea but at the same spider rocks? Really?

One thing I did not like about 'Apollo 18' was the fact that the government at the end of the movie decided to leave the American astronauts up in space. Fair enough they had been contaminated but surely some doctor somewhere on Earth would jump at the chance to examine their bodies and find out what these creatures are. It also bugged me as they also left open the idea that the astronaut's are still in space or did they come back to Earth? The film ends on an enigma or a cliff hanger as it explains how the moon rocks (which could be believed to be the creatures) were dispersed around the world and were either stolen or missing. Well does that mean that the government have covered the expedition up or somewhere in the world people are infected by the creatures from the moon?

Overall it's a brilliant concept it just didn't make sense to me in some parts. Did anyone else feel like this too? If so leave a comment below.

Enjoy x

IMDb: Apollo 18