I have to say, I am rather fond of found footage movies. You need to go into these with the presumption that all characters you are about to see are going to die (there are exceptions to this rule, but they’re rare) but they can be fun and creepy to watch. There is always the problem of explaining why everything is being filmed, but if the film makers come up with a convincing reason for this you can suspend your disbelief and watch the movie.

That being said, it’s not always that simple. Like any other film, a plot needs to be reasonably convincing, which leads me to what I watched this evening – “Apollo 18”. I wasn’t impressed.

It’s a brave attempt, I’ll give it that. As film that was supposed to have been taken in the early seventies, and in space, there is a graininess and lack of clear pictures that need to be expected. They have on the whole achieved this. However, this makes its own problems.

The movie was marketed with the catch phrase ‘There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon’. It’s not a stretch for anyone going in to figure out that there will be aliens, so that’s not much of a spoiler. And that’s not really the problem. Granted, not seeing the bad things clearly is a stock staple of any horror movie. It’s what builds tension. But you do expect to see the alien nasties clearly eventually, and this never happens. Even at the climax, broken up footage means the aliens are not well lit, or only appear for fractions of seconds. As a viewer I found this quite frustrating.

As a NASA mission, the constant footage is easily explained. There will be film inside the spaceship, and cameras on the exterior to film around the spaceship. The astronauts themselves will carry cameras to film what they do on their travels outside the lander. We are told quite early on that there is a mysterious interference which is affecting transmissions, including the film. This is a decent explanation for when footage does break up.

There is a great, big hole in this plot, and that is the most frustrating part of it, Why are they on the moon? We are told at the start that they are placing surveillance equipment which is supposed to spy on the Russians. In the time period being depicted that is completely logical and the astronauts have no reason to doubt it. But (and spoilers for anyone who cares to watch this) they discover that the Department of Defence was fully aware of the presence of aliens. They say to the man trapped on the surface that they cannot bring him home, as he will be infected (yes the aliens can get inside you.) This brings us to the question – why were they sent there? It would appear that the so-called surveillance equipment has nothing to do with spying on the Russians, and a lot to do with attracting the aliens. Why? What is the government learning by sending men on a suicide mission? They apparently already knew that the aliens were capable of infesting humans, so that wasn’t news to them. They have wasted a great deal of money and three lives. There is nothing that happened during the course of this movie that gave the mission any logic at all.

The plot had nothing new to offer. Small group of people go to isolated place and run into scary monsters who kill them. It had nothing new to offer the horror genre, the science fiction genre, or movies in general. The cast were fine and did their best with very uninspiring material, but it was just something I’d seen a million times before and often done better. The aliens themselves, from what can be seen of them, appear to be bug or spider like, which is hardly a new idea. They can infest and apparently control people – also a very old idea. The characters are  isolated, they have to escape, they’re running out of air … heard it all before.

Basically, if you’re looking for a found footage movie set in space that blends horror and science fiction, I would strongly recommend you watch “Europa Report”. Now THAT was a good movie! You can skip this one.