Saturday, September 17, 2011

I can feel my thoughts...fragmenting.

Moon rocks are like lava rocks times a billion.
My crappy theater is awesome in one respect. They will let you use a free pass for a particular movie to see anything else. Today, I used an expiring pass to The Smurfs to catch Apollo 18. Now, I had caught wind that this 'found-footage' flick wasn't really anything special, but at 86 minutes, I figured I'd risk it. The premise was certainly intriguing enough.

A quick positive? These astronauts can hold a camera still. Yes, I was one of those a-holes who bought into the hype of The Blair Witch Project (I knew it was fake, but I didn't correct anybody if they told me it was real) and I caught that one in the theater, too - twelve years ago (goodness!). The lasting impression for me was the damn piss-poor quality of the camerawork. Oh, I mean authenticity - my bad. Anyway, this one is much easier on the eyes (and the stomach).

More importantly, the atmosphere is captured really well. The moon is creepy. It's cold and dark and there may or may not be homicidal Russians afoot. Even worse than a delirious Sergei and Vladimir, are the shape-shifting extraterrestrials that want to bore into your anus. Okay maybe not anus, but still. They want inside of you. Hey man, the moon is cold. Your ass? Pretty warm.

Deciding to follow footprints means you hate living.
So, is it scary? Not really. Though to be fair, there are two major jump-scares, each of which really got me. Other than those two however, it's almost too quiet up there. Though edited tightly, it starts to drag at times. And like many horror movies, once you fully see what we're dealing with, the wheels come off and you're just waiting for the credits.

Now, there's basically only two people in this movie and they both do a convincing job of dealing with all the lunacy (hi-yo!). What was not convincing, however, is that these two dudes were astronauts from the 70's. Nope. Didn't buy it. Dudes looked like they worked at Home Depot in the 90's.

All that said, I'm glad I saw it. I probably would have better enjoyed Drive or Contagion, but I wanted to get home to the fam. Matty started watching Star Wars today. He absolutely loves A New Hope and the whole galaxy of robots and aliens. See, those aliens are trying to help you, versus, you know, trying to enter you.

3 comments:

  1. Have you heard of this movie? Interesting concept.

    http://www.intimemovie.com/

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  2. Yeah, looks promising. And I basically have a man-crush on Timberlake...so...yeah, I'm there.

    ReplyDelete