The premise behind “Apollo 18,” as everyone who has seen the trailers know, is that a secret Apollo mission to the moon was launched a couple of years after Apollo 17 and the astronauts found something horrible on the lunar surface.
“Apollo 18″ works very well as a movie if one chooses to suspend disbelief (more on that anon.) The horror aspects of this alternate history chiller are more restrained than most of its genre. Heads do not explode nor do icky things burst from peoples’ chests. The dread is gradually ratcheted up with strange noises, interference seeping onto the comm links, and things barely seen from the corner of one’s eye. It is a great use of the less is more approach.
The fear is enhanced by the claustrophobic nature of living and working on the moon in the early 1970s. The cabin of a lunar module is a tight, cramped place set in the middle of an environment that would kill an unprotected man instantly, even leaving out creepy, crawlers who do bad things to Earthlings. There is almost literally nowhere to run, though the unfortunate Apollo astronauts try.
The movie also works as a recreation of what a fictitious Apollo mission to the moon would have been like. Using NASA footage, “found footage” shot primarily in fuzzy, static laden, period style, and a magnificent effort to recreate the lunar surface on a sound stage, “Apollo 18″ really takes the viewer to the moon in the company of the Apollo astronaut characters. The unknown actors who play the crew of Apollo 18 have the look and mannerisms of NASA astronauts of the era, acting as they are trained as the mounting horror of their situation gradually overcomes their “right stuff” demeanor.
And now the nitpicking.
Naturally the idea of a top secret mission to the moon is ludicrous. Concealing the launch of a Saturn V as an unmanned DOD mission would be almost impossible to pull off and, in many ways, unnecessary. Flying the mission as another trip to the moon, with a cover story, would have sufficed.
Also, while it was necessary for the crew not to be told of the true nature of their mission in order to gen up suspense, in the real world it would not have been either necessary or desirable. The Apollo astronauts were by and large military test pilots, quite capable of keeping classified information to themselves. Also they would have been more likely to succeed in their true mission has they known what was waiting for them on the lunar surface.
But that would have made “Apollo 18″ a different movie. It is a case of reality having to bend to service the plot. It is the one flaw in an otherwise original, suspenseful film.
Source: Apollo 18, Yahoo Movies