Whenever I explain to people why I rarely watch T.V. anymore, I tell them that it’s because of the lack of diversity that’s on now. Nowadays, all we seem to have are shows about cops, hospitals, or lawyers. If you don’t want to watch any of those, then all there’s left are reality shows and I don’t like those too much either. they’ve even slowed down on talk shows and black shows. With the exception of sports, “The Smoking Guns World’s Dumbest”, and a couple of others, I don’t have a lot of options. The film “Apollo 18” shows that movies seem to do this at times as well.
In Hollywood, when something sells well it seems like it’s almost guaranteed that you’re going to have sequels and/or other people in Hollywood using the same style and plot of the movie that sold so well. In most cases, these other movies are no where near as good as the original, but they’ll try anyway and eventually run these ideas into the ground. I don’t have a problem with this as long as the movie are good. Which brings us to “Apollo 18″ or as I like to call it, Blair Witch Project in Space. We’ve seen a ton of these kinds of films since “The Blair Witch Project” and none of them had been anywhere near as good. I went into this with a partially closed mind, because of this fact, but I’m always willing to be proven wrong in these situations.
Although the film is fictional, Apollo 18 was a real mission that was planned to go to the moon that never actually happened. The premise of the film is that the mission did indeed happen, but the space shuttle and the astronauts aboard it never returned. These events were supposed to have happened in December of 1974 and the videos were later found and viewed in 2011. What really happened to these three men and a very large conspiracy that is exposed are explained as we watch the movie.
While it’s not a deep movie in any sense of the word, I have to admit that actually liked it. There were a ton of plot holes, but from a pure entertainment aspect it wasn’t bad at all. During the movie, you’ll watch certain parts and think of how stupid these segments are for the simple fact that most of them could have easily been avoided. This starts almost right at the beginning and goes almost completely to the end. If they would have had the story make more sense, then I would have given it a higher score and it could have been battling for my favorite film of the summer.
The shock sequences completely make up for a lot of the problems that are in this film. The scary parts are the primary reasons why anyone would watch a scary movie in the first place right? There’s a lot of suspense in this intense and aggressive film. I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was, especially due to the fact that it was PG-13 and I thought that would restrict it. I haven’t seen a decent American horror movie in awhile, so this is pretty rare for me. While it was nowhere near great, it was fun as far as the scares are concerned. Some people will focus on the holes in the plot and the level of stupidity shown by the characters throughout the film. Personally, the events in the film are what I’ll take from it the most, because that was its main purpose and it delivered on that.
If you’ve seen movies like this before, then you probably have a good feel on what’s going to happen to these dudes on this fictional Apollo 18 mission. With that said, it’s still fun and it offers a few scares throughout. Now since we’ve had “The Blair Witch Project sequel, “The Blair Witch Project” in a house (“Paranormal Activity”), Blair Witch Project in an apartment building (“Quarantine”, which is a remake of a Spanish movie “REC”), and Blair Witch Project with aliens on Earth (Cloverfield), I guess now it’s only fitting that we have “The Blair Witch Project” in space. With the exception of the original Blair Witch Project, this is probably the best of the bunch. Although I liked it, I do hope they find a few new ideas to use now.
