reveals that Apollo 18 was a top secret mission designed to do...something. I think they were placing some transmitter doo-hickeys on the moon to monitor something or other. Once on the moon, though, our intrepid astroboys are attacked by...um...rocks...I think. Or was it strange crab-like creatures? Or was it rocks that turn into crab-like creatures? Or was it the alien? After all, one of the rocks did insert itself into Lloyd Owen, turning him into a goggle-eyed maniac. So maybe it was the alien. Or something else. If I sound unsure of myself, that's because the movie never really seemed to make it clear just what the alien was or what it had against the friendly, visiting delegates from Earth. Well, anyway, Lloyd and fellow moonwalker Ryan Robbins discover a Soviet moonlander. It's abandoned, but otherwise fairly intact. Nearby, in a dark and spooky crater lit only by the strobes of Ryan's camera flash (we spent all that money to send men to the moon, but we forgot to give them flashlights?) they find the corpse of the cosmonaut. Decayed. The movie never gets around to explaining how he decayed in an airless, sub-zero environment, so just work with me here, okay? He's all decayed. Soon after Lloyd starts showing the effects of 
his own contamination. It's the usual stuff - rapid movement, bulging eyes, wild ranting. After trying to trash the lander, Lloyd escapes and runs off into the night. Ryan tries to follow him into yet another dark and spooky crater, where he is assaulted by crab-like creatures. He escapes, makes his way to the Soviet lander and takes off, only to find that the Soviet lander is full of rocks...that turn into crab-like creatures... and eat him. Of course, everyone dies in the end which presents one slight continuity problem. If the astroboys are filming everything on these handheld cameras that take film cartridges, and they are all killed on the moon, and no one else ever went back to the moon, then how did the film cartridges end up in the super top secret vault at NASA? Oh, but film makers hate people like me. At any rate, as I have already pointed out, Apollo 18 purports to be recently discovered film footage from 1972, and at that, at least, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego did a very good job of recreating the look of NASA film stock. That both helps and hinders the film. Remember when Neil Armstrong stepped onto Lunar soil for the first time? Remember how fuzzy everything was, as Neil's form, almost a palimpsest of a human being, moved around the Lunar landscape, dragging ghosts of his own image about with him? Okay, now imagine watching a whole movie that was done just like that, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this movie was like. That and the whole shaky-shaky camera thing gets a little tiresome after a while. I'd have much preferred straight, old-fashioned camera work to this "I gotta 
camera and I'm gonna film everything I see" garbage. Finally, I found that the astroboys lost their cool extraordinarily fast. I mean, these are guys who are trained for years to keep their cool under any situation, yet they practically fly to pieces at the first corpse they come across. I would expect cooler heads on the moon. After all, it was only one corpse. Still, I suppose that some will find Apollo 18 entertaining. Some may even find it scary. It just failed to scare or entertain me.Apollo 18 is rated PG-13 and is filmed in grainy, shaky color.
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