Space Scares Me: "Apollo 18"

I love sci-fi, I love horror, but space... "Space Scares Me" is a series that is part review, part liveblog, about space movies I've been too chicken to watch until now. Previously: "Gravity" (2013) and "The Martian" (2015)

I remember seeing a trailer for "Apollo 18" before its release, and I had two thoughts. First: I love this premise. Second: I don't think I can handle it. Every once in a while it pops back into my head and I ask myself again, "am I too chicken for this?" Spoiler: Yes. Yep. Big ol' chicken. I've been very excited to finally watch "Apollo 18". As a horror fan, it's been one of my biggest regrets that I've procrastinated for 11 years on a movie I knew I would like because I knew it would freak me out.

The movie opens by setting up several layers of narrative context. Apollo 18 is described as a classified mission headed by the Department of Defense in 1974. In 2011, 80 hours of footage from the mission was uploaded to a website called Lunar Truther. (Remember when movies used to push their promotional websites?) The movie is a found footage documentary from that material. So, I am in the year 2022 watching a 2011 movie likely constructed by a conspiracy theorist (in-universe) from footage shot on 1970s camera tech. In space. It absolutely commits to the bit, too. In the early part of the movie before things get wild, there are some slow-motion playbacks with a highlight around things moving in the background. That's cute. I like it.

It took me a little while to put myself in the right headspace. I immediately found myself questioning how anyone could send a mission to space and keep it totally secret. Everyone would see a rocket taking off, right? But I had to remember this is the 70s and not everyone has cameras and a way to communicate to the whole public in their pocket. That context also informs some of the shot choices throughout the movie. My partner asked why they would have shot this unimportant moment or that angle. My answer was, hey, it's three dudes in space with cameras in the 70s. Even today we have astronauts taking fun, spontaneous footage in space. Back then it would have been novel.

The first real "something's wrong" moment for our three American astronauts comes when they find human footprints on the moon that were not made by NASA suits. I had a funny moment where I said "How would the Russians be here without anyone knowing about it?", and then one of the characters said the same thing. Then I answered myself, "Well, these guys are on the moon and nobody knows about it..." just before another character said that, too. A lot of the dialog in the movie is improvised, and even the more scripted moments feel pretty spontaneous. So I enjoyed seeing the "movie logic" match with my "viewer logic" so closely.

I have extremely few "live blog" notes beyond this point. I had the laptop open in front of me for the entire film, but from "There's something in my suit!" onward I was totally unable to take notes. It's not even so cliché as, "I couldn't look away". I'm very good at touch typing. For most of this movie, my hands were otherwise occupied wish shaking, hugging myself, putting on and taking off a sweatshirt, and clenching fists.

"There's something moving in my suit! It's in my helmet!" sounds like a horror movie. It sounds like writing. It sounds like acting. Well, tell that to my stomach. Something about being completely isolated in space with few resources to deal with the unexpected makes even tired tropes feel real to me. The unlucky astronaut, Nate, freaks out and has to be rescued by Ben. Immediately, Nate looks tired and somehow older while recovering from this panic. And then they notice he's bleeding.

I swear, every movie I've watched lately has amateur surgery somewhere. It happened in "The Martian", it happened in "Annihilation", and now I've got to see it again. Can I handle gore? Yeah, usually. Can I handle gore with the context that there is no hospital you could possibly go to if things go south? No, please. So Ben takes a big pair of tongs and extracts an entire moon rock from Nate's torso. Huh, how'd that get in there?

Throughout the rest of the film, the conflict continues to fill out the "nope" bingo card. Ordered from least-nope to hell-nope: there are dead Russians on the moon, there's a big dark crater they can only light by camera flashes, the man we took the rock out of gets more and more ill and unhinged, every moon rock is a monster (called "moonsters" behind-the-scenes), and the DoD is leaving them out there to die. Bingo.

Have I mentioned that I don't handle on-screen illness very well? I do not. Watching a character be sick breaks me almost as badly as witnessing their isolation in space. (Ask my mom how I did seeing "District 9" in the theater.) It's a double whammy: he's sick with a mysterious space illness and no one is even going to attempt to save him. I just folded my arms up around myself after writing that sentence. Big dislike. (But the kind of "dislike" that acknowledges the efficacy of the narrative. Love-hate.)

Unlike the previous two movies I've written about, this is 100% tragedy. For a little while I held out hope that the third astronaut, who has been in orbit and out of contact for much of the film, might make it home. After all, he hasn't been exposed to the surface, and someone has to bring the film back to Earth. In the final cut of the film they even run with the idea of bringing him back if he's willing to leave his colleagues behind. But he's too good a dude. He's not willing to leave his surviving crew member behind. The choice is sort of made for him, though, as the rendezvous results in a collision. Their families are given lame excuses about training accidents. The movie ends with a reminder that many moon rocks have been brought to Earth, several of those were given as gifts, and some of those have gone missing. And that's a true statement. Really weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The bonus content is interesting insight into how the narrative was crafted, trying on different story pieces until they fit. You get the feeling that everyone involved had the freedom to make suggestions and sculpt the final product. The handheld and DIY nature of the genre gives you the flexibility to hear a good idea and go, "okay, let's try it!" Some scenes took moments from the final cut and presented them in a completely different context. There were several versions of the moment they find the dead cosmonaut. They shot four entirely different deaths for the character Ben Anderson. I don't mean "slightly different" deaths, I mean conceptually distinct endings with unique special effects. There's another ending where the last man does make it home and has an uncomfortable debriefing.

You see more "creature shots" in the deleted scenes than you do in the movie itself. This gave them room to decide how much moonster was the correct amount and pick the one that reads best. It's especially interesting to see these details getting hashed out in the shoot and the edit rather than in screipt rewrites. The crux of the narrative was always the same, but you see all the branching paths they could have taken.

The DVD commentary, which I'm listening to as I write, was recorded soon after finishing the edit and before the film was even released. That's probably for the best, because the critics were not kind to "Apollo 18". Around the time of release people were starting to get tired of found footage horror, and new entries to the genre were dismissed as "rip offs" of "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project". That's really too bad. Maybe if the timing had been different, people would have seen the love and creativity and ingenuity that went into "Apollo 18".