The Apollo 18 Movie thread

[CitabriaFlyer]

I can't disagree with Blackstar that maybe the movie feels like a short story.  However, that is a strength.  It is a short film; however, if it had been made longer it would have paced too slow.  I am glad it was on film and I think the 1970s documentary style worked.  This film does not compare to historical (Apollo 13) or pseudohistorical (Right Stuff) films.  Nor is it sci fi like Star Trek or something like that.

It is a horror movie.  The most similar thing is Paranormal Activity which I enjoyed.  So if you liked that movie you would like this one.  I have also seen it compared to Blair Witch but I never saw that one.

It has got mostly negative reviews on this site and in fact I heard people making negative comments leaving the theater.  However, I liked it better than Species, Event Horizon, etc...

Finally, how quickly could a Falcon 9 Heavy/Dragon get to the lunar south pole?


Just kidding.

[Blackstar]

So, whats the verdict, better or worse than The Moon ? Sounds like a definite netflix material so far.

Oh, Moon is an excellent film with great acting and lots of emotion. Apollo 18 is nowhere near as good. If Moon is a 7 or 8 out of ten, Apollo 18 would be more like a 4 or 5 at best.

I'm actually more interested in how and why it got made. Clearly somebody had a gem of an idea. I actually think it was a pretty good idea. They just lacked the skill to do it really well. But like I wrote earlier, they were definitely trying. So where did they get the idea? How did they pitch it? How was this filmed? Where did they get the props?

To be honest, I think the "found footage" concept has really been exhausted. It's been done in a lot of movies and although I would never say that it's impossible to do something original with that concept, it is really really hard to do something original. If they had filmed Apollo 18 as a more conventional movie, without the jittery camera and static and all that, it could have been more effective.

[Blackstar]

I can't disagree with Blackstar that maybe the movie feels like a short story.  However, that is a strength.  It is a short film; however, if it had been made longer it would have paced too slow.  I am glad it was on film and I think the 1970s documentary style worked.  This film does not compare to historical (Apollo 13) or pseudohistorical (Right Stuff) films. 

Don't get me wrong--I was not complaining that it felt like a short story. I was observing that the Apollo 18 story might work better as short written fiction than something on film.

Another example is the John Carpenter movie The Fog (the 1980 one, not the wretched 2005 remake). Although I've watched that film several times, it always struck me that it would make for a great book while it was only a so-so movie. The reason is that reading a book is personal, solitary. You do it alone, and your own imagination plays a greater role than in a movie because you are providing the images rather than the movie providing them for you.

If you think about The Fog, the story involves a leper colony on the Pacific coast that was betrayed by the people they thought were helping them. The idea of these leprous ghosts emerging from the fog 100 years later to seek vengeance is classic campfire ghost story stuff, the kind of thing that could really scare the heck out of you if you are reading the book all alone under a single light. But in the movie John Carpenter had to rely upon these figures with glowing eyes emerging from the fog, sometimes jumping out and bashing through walls. The actual depiction on film was probably less scary than it would be if you were reading it.

Apollo 18 has a similar problem. They resorted to CGI (I don't want to give any spoilers). It was rather cheap CGI, but I thought that it was decent. However, imagine reading it as a short story and coming across a line like this:

Nate suddenly realized that there was something in his suit. It was moving.



Wouldn't that creep you out?

It has got mostly negative reviews on this site and in fact I heard people making negative comments leaving the theater.  However, I liked it better than Species, Event Horizon, etc...

Admittedly, both of those movies had much bigger budgets, named actors, etc. I thought that Event Horizon was an awful film in many ways, including just not making any sense (they tried too hard to make it seem like a haunted house in space, even down to the lightning). Species was ridiculous, but it did have Natasha Henstridge:

http://www.thefilmyap.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Species_l.jpg

[CitabriaFlyer]

OK.  I revise my position on Species.

But seriously, I did leave the theater wanting to know more of the Apollo 18 story.  What did NASA and DoD know and when did they know it?  Was there a clue from the other missions?  What if anything did the Russians learn?  How did these events play into the Bush and later Obama moon plans? 

Maybe some aspiring writer will take on your suggestion?  Is there a novelization?  or maybe some things are better left to the imagination.

The whole NASA conspiracy idea reminded me of another movie which in many ways was ridiculous but entertaining nonetheless - Capricorn 1.

[e of pi]

Just out of curiosity, did they mention at all the name of the LM or the CSM?

[CitabriaFlyer]

Freedom and Liberty.

I believe Freedom was CSM and Liberty LM but I may have that backwards

[dks13827]

 
This movie is like:   ' Aliens inside the Lunar Module '.

The Apollo footage was good to see.

[KelvinZero]

Just saw it.  It is NOT Apollo 13.  It is a cheesy horror flick.  Having said that it was a cheesy horror flick done in a unique setting.  There are lot of technicalities that may be inaccurate but who cares?  It's not a documentary.  It is a clever little film which was well executed.  Worth going to see in the theater and I left wondering what happened next?  I would actually be happy to see a sequel or a prequel.

Just saw it myself. It wasn't good, but I do give them an A for effort. After all, how many movies about Apollo are there... at all? So I'm glad that somebody is playing in this sandbox.

Ditto. I dont mind cheese. I even liked Pluto Nash because there is almost no attempt to set scifi in this solarsystem anymore in movies or tv.

[Blackstar]

Near-term sci-fi is rare because it doesn't really allow the writers to employ magic. When you think about it, most science fiction defies physics and often defies logic. This really opens up the story possibilities. Spaceships can fly vast distances in short periods of time, people can wield light-sabers, etc.

I've been thinking about how Apollo 18 could have been a better movie. I can think of a number of tweaks (better actors, for instance, less shaky-cam). One of the lost opportunities is that we never really get to like the characters and identify with them.

I also think it would have been great if the closing credits would have used David Bowie's "Space Oddity" (aka "Major Tom"), which would have been fitting.

[Oberon_Command]

Near-term sci-fi is rare because it doesn't really allow the writers to employ magic. When you think about it, most science fiction defies physics and often defies logic. This really opens up the story possibilities. Spaceships can fly vast distances in short periods of time, people can wield light-sabers, etc.

Are you sure you're not mixing up science fiction and science fantasy (which is what Star Wars actually is)? Granted that it's easy to do since there aren't a whole lot of proper hard SF movies, but they are pretty distinct things, and I don't think this criticism holds up for actual SF. If it has "magic" in it, it's not really science fiction - it's science fantasy.

[KelvinZero]

Near-term sci-fi is rare because it doesn't really allow the writers to employ magic. When you think about it, most science fiction defies physics and often defies logic. This really opens up the story possibilities. Spaceships can fly vast distances in short periods of time, people can wield light-sabers, etc.

I've been thinking about how Apollo 18 could have been a better movie. I can think of a number of tweaks (better actors, for instance, less shaky-cam). One of the lost opportunities is that we never really get to like the characters and identify with them.

Liking the characters is always the most important thing IMO.
Most scifi movies do not try to be imaginative with their technology though. They follow rigid rules. ftl, rayguns, gravity plates etc. It teaches us that solarsystems are tiny places consisting of one or two movie sets. IMO few or none communicate the true size and variation of this solarsystem.

[savuporo]

Near-term sci-fi is rare because it doesn't really allow the writers to employ magic. When you think about it, most science fiction defies physics and often defies logic. This really opens up the story possibilities.

Actually there is quite a bit of near-term hard sci-fi around, including storylines taking place in solar system. For instance, see "The Hard SF Renaissance". A number of good writers are currently productive in the field.

[Blackstar]

Are you sure you're not mixing up science fiction and science fantasy (which is what Star Wars actually is)? Granted that it's easy to do since there aren't a whole lot of proper hard SF movies, but they are pretty distinct things, and I don't think this criticism holds up for actual SF. If it has "magic" in it, it's not really science fiction - it's science fantasy.

No, I'm not mixing them up. I just don't believe that there's any clear, or even very blurry, distinction between the two. Just about all science fiction has to violate the laws of physics in some way, or at least ignore them.

[Blackstar]

Actually there is quite a bit of near-term hard sci-fi around, including storylines taking place in solar system. For instance, see "The Hard SF Renaissance". A number of good writers are currently productive in the field.

Relative to all the rest, it is a very tiny percentage. Name a good hard sci-fi movie done in the past ten years. Okay, Moon. Name another one.

You gotta admit that this stuff is still pretty rare.

[savuporo]

Actually there is quite a bit of near-term hard sci-fi around, including storylines taking place in solar system. For instance, see "The Hard SF Renaissance". A number of good writers are currently productive in the field.

Relative to all the rest, it is a very tiny percentage. Name a good hard sci-fi movie done in the past ten years. Okay, Moon. Name another one.

You gotta admit that this stuff is still pretty rare.

Im not arguing at all on the movies side. The only recent ones were Sunshine and Moon. Sunshine, first part was tolerable, did not quite like the other half.

My point was that the genre is well alive in the literature, and if anyone wanted to there would be a ton of writers and existing story settings to choose from for a good movie ( or a computer game, which often end up with sub-par story writings )

EDIT: actually, Disctrict 9 could be categorized as somewhat sci-fi, not very hard though , and i loved it. Oh, and Wall-E of course.

EDIT: btw, i plunked District 9, Moon and Sunshine alongside into google and found this : http://listverse.com/2010/01/23/top-20-science-fiction-movies-of-the-2000s/
Pretty good, although diverges from the topic of hard sci-fi and especially space or solar system sci fi. It still includes dumb movies even though they claim to exclude these

[Blackstar]

Im not arguing at all on the movies side. The only recent ones were Sunshine and Moon. Sunshine, first part was tolerable, did not quite like the other half.

My point was that the genre is well alive in the literature, and if anyone wanted to there would be a ton of writers and existing story settings to choose from for a good movie ( or a computer game, which often end up with sub-par story writings )

Well, it's a movie thread, so I assumed we were discussing movies. There was a good article on io9.com in the past year (and I doubt I'll be able to find it because their search function is less than good) about how, when you really get down to it, there are virtually no science fiction books or movies that do not violate the laws of physics in some way. In fact, as they pointed out, even works that report to be hard sci-fi usually are only very clever at hiding how impossible they are. Recently I was at a discussion by a number of "hard sci-fi" authors where Greg Bear noted that he had never read a science fiction book involving a spaceship that was actually realistic. The problem is always that the ships never have enough fuel to get where they are going. So he wrote Hull Zero Three based upon the premise that an interstellar ship would need a fuel tank the size of a moon.

As for hard science fiction making a comeback in literature, I think you're right about that. There are certainly a lot of hard science fiction novels out there. More so than in the recent past. But I'd also question the percentages. Fantasy--not only dragons, but vampire novels, "urban fantasy," etc.--has ballooned in the past couple of decades. It used to be that you could go into a bookstore and find an entire row labeled "science fiction." Now it has been merged with fantasy, and often over half of the titles are fantasy. I don't have numbers, but I have suspicions that science fiction overall is losing ground to fantasy.

By the way, I'll be writing for TSR about the book Heaven's Shadow soon. And I'll be mixing in some comments about this panel at Comic Con:

12:00-1:00 Speculative Fiction: Space Odyssey, Alien Encounters, and Future Worlds— Science fiction writers use their genre's power to amuse and entertain, discuss the past and the present by writing about the future, and inspire and motivate us to future achievements. Stretch the bonds of imagination with Greg Bear (Hull Zero Three), Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep), James S. A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes), Gini Koch (The Alien/Katherine "Kitty" Katt series), Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), Timothy Zahn (Star Wars: Choice of One), Kirsten Imani Kasai (Tattoo), David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt (Heaven's Shadow), moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy.

[Skylab]

This was almost as convincing as the "KGB launches midget cosmonaut inside Lunokhod" reports. Well okay, not really. Not by a mile, actually.

[luke strawwalker]

This seems an awful lot of fuss about a piece of Hollywood make believe!

I'm old enough to remember a comic strip series in the UK newspaper 'Daily Express' where just after the Apollo 17 mission their hero, Jeff Hawke' found a humanoid skull on the Moon. I can't remember that it caused all this furore.

In a  similar vein, I'm trying to remember the name of a movie I saw once, well, I saw a brief part of it. 

A lunar crew landed on the moon and are exploring around, and on top of a rock, covered in lunar dust, they find a tattered Confederate battle flag...

That's all I can remember of it.  Anybody else ever see this movie?? 
Later!  OL JR

[luke strawwalker]

Sorry to be a grump, but I have to ask.  Why is this thread listed in the "Historical Spaceflight" category?

 - Ed Kyle

Forums Historical Spaceflight definition?

Historical Spaceflight
Missions that were, or will never be.

Besides, as far as I can tell, it is the only thread that has not yet turned into a spaceX thread

That's because they could have done it faster, better, AND cheaper!!!

Later!  OL JR

[mjcrsmith]

Sorry to be a grump, but I have to ask.  Why is this thread listed in the "Historical Spaceflight" category?

 - Ed Kyle

Forums Historical Spaceflight definition?

Historical Spaceflight
Missions that were, or will never be.

Besides, as far as I can tell, it is the only thread that has not yet turned into a spaceX thread

That's because they could have done it faster, better, AND cheaper!!!

Later!  OL JR

If only we had Direct in the early 1970's all this could have been avoided.