As we all know 1972's Apollo 17 was NASA's last manned mission to the Moon (to date).
Or so we were led to believe.
My latest bargain Blu-Ray purchase, Apollo 18, posits a top secret mission in December 1973 to plant Cold War listening devices on The Moon, but something went wrong and that's why the Americans have never been back.
Then apparently in 2011, a whistleblower dumped 80 hours of video footage from the mission online, from which this 'found footage' style, faux documentary, was assembled.
Now, I thought I was over the 'found footage' craze shortly after the market was saturated with ill-conceived Blair Witch Project knock-offs, but recently I've stumbled upon a couple (this and the superb As Above, So Below) that have made me reconsider my prejudices.
One thing Apollo 18 gets right straight off the bat is that it doesn't hang around. Within minutes of introducing the three astronauts we're going to be following they're in space and then on The Moon.
And the speeding train doesn't slow down. It's not long after they've landed that the weird shit starts happening and, given the speed with which events unfold, you find yourself wondering how director Gonzalo López-Gallego is going to keep Brian Miller's script running for the film's 75-minute duration (it's listed as 86-minutes, but the balance is just the closing credits).
But fear not. The pacing is superb throughout, and, barring a couple of lukewarm jump scares (one's played for laughs anyway), the story is somewhere between a modern Doctor Who and Event Horizon in its atmosphere.
In fact, I would make an argument for Apollo 18's possible inclusion in my unofficial headcanon of the Alien film franchise timeline.
After all, it manages to keep the incident (except for the 2011 'leak') under wraps, with only the Department of Defence being in the know, and takes a very measured approach to the possibility of an extraterrestrial lifeform.
Already plagued by communications interference, the astronauts of Apollo 18 discover evidence of a heretofore unknown Soviet mission to The Moon, but then begin to suspect that there's also something 'inhuman' up there with them as well.
The film's footage looks, for the most part, as though it's aged, period stock, encapsulating López-Gallego's eye for authenticity that - to an untrained, unscientific eye like my own - feels as though the 'found footage' could have been genuine.
Except for the unfortunate fact that - and this is no reflection at all on the actors, who are all wholly convincing - I recognised the men playing the three lead characters: Capt. Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, from Alphas, Batwoman etc), Lt Col John Grey (Ryan Robbins, from Riverdale, Arrow etc) and Commander Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, from The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones).
But, let's be honest, the story is ultimately so far into tinfoil hat conspiracy theory land that no one is really going to believe it's real.
That said, it appears to have been convincing enough that NASA felt the need to put out a disclaimer.
Apollo 18 does a smashing job of maintaining its verisimilitude, right up to the denouement where we get the "official" explanation of what happened to the three men.
Within the context of the story, I bought the reason for NASA never returning to The Moon one hundred percent.
If you can accept the movie's premise, of being 'lost footage' from a classified American space mission, then you should love this.
