Somehow, I got talked into going to see Apollo 18. I knew it wasn’t going to be good since it only had  18% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I wondered how bad it could be. Well I’m glad I saw it, since now I can warn the rest of you away from seeing it. This is a boring, horrible movie. It isn’t good as a horror movie and doesn’t even try as a science fiction movie. And, worst of all, it’s boring. The movie focuses the last hour of the movie on the two astronauts who are on the moon. So we spend an hour focusing on two people and, in the end, we know nothing about them. They are simply props there to speak dialogue which advances the so-called plot. So, lets see how the movie got this bad.

As everyone knows, Apollo 18, 19 & 20 were canceled in the early 70s due to budgetary concerns. Apollo 17 was the last trip to the moon. At the beginning of the story, our hero astronauts are called into a secret DOD mission to the moon. They are not allowed to tell anyone and they’re on their way. We have two guys on the lander and one left on the control ship. For the majority of the movie we only see these 3 guys plus a couple voices from NASA and DOD. Their secret mission is to put out some motion detecting cameras and other electronics on the South Pole of the moon.

While there, they find a dead cosmonaut and a partially trashed Russian lander. DOD confirms that they believed that USSR had a moon mission but no proof. Then the weird things start happening. The guys wake up and things are knocked over outside and their ship engine is damaged which hampers them taking off from the moon. Then one of the guys freaks out (thinking something is in his spacesuit on a moonwalk) and ends up getting something in his system. The rest of the movie is trying to find out what is there and to leave the moon.

The plot is bare thin and there are no characters. I don’t remember any of their names and it doesn’t matter. There’s the snoring guy and the family guy on the moon. The control ship guy just floats around talking and we know nothing about him. This is the type of movie that gives science fiction (and horror) a bad name. This movie didn’t fail because of the genre, this movie failed because it completely and utterly sucked. No one thought to do a script beyond the 10 second pitch (Blair Witch on the moon). This movie is so bad that it shouldn’t just be pulled out of theaters, it should be destroyed and never shown again. The screenplay writer (Brian Miller) should probably be removed from Hollywood (forcibly if need be). He has an hour with 2 characters and can’t make anything out of it. With 60 minutes on a small enclosing place and nothing else to distract the viewer, the characters need to be memorable. And it completely failed.

The visuals were idiotic. I’m pretty sure the kids’ movie from Super 8 was better written and directed. The movie attempts to replicate what the movie cameras on the moon in 1970s would look like. But I’m pretty sure the actual astronauts could have done better in that regard. And all the garbling and special effects were badly done and very distracting. There are better movies out there which handle a small cast in a confined area (Apollo 13 if you’re in the space mood or Open Water or 127 Hours) and any of them would be a much better viewing that this. Avoid at all costs.