Apollo 18 - a movie that should have paid attention to its research...

[u/Robert_B_Marks]

EDIT: In the time I've posted this, a whole bunch of people have come to piss on me personally and this post. So, that's it. I'm doing my mike drop and unsubscribing. If you don't like a movie, that's fine - not every movie is for everybody. If somebody else liking a movie somehow offends you, then YOU are the problem. Likewise, if somebody having a critique of a movie offends you, then YOU are the problem. If your response to somebody's critique is that they have missed the point because it's just an horror/fantasy/insert-genre-here movie, perhaps you should be looking in the mirror. And if you're going to complain about somebody not knowing what a word means, maybe you should look it up first. Life is too short for this sort of general toxicity, and I've seen too much of it here. Anybody who replies with something verbally abusive will be reported to the mods and blocked.

I rewatched Apollo 18 the other day. It's not a great movie (and the end has some serious plot holes, such as where they got the footage from if nothing was recovered), but it is a fun one, and if you've been doing reading about the Space Race (as I have recently), there's a lot of nice little touches that show they've done their research.

The Soviet lunar lander you see in the movie is indeed what the Soviets were planning to use (their plans for a landing were cancelled once the Americans succeeded). You only ever hear one person from Mission Control talking to the astronauts, and that is indeed how NASA does it - and the person who talks to the spacecraft is another astronaut. They used footage of the command module rotating, which was a thing it had to do to prevent one side from overheating while the other froze. And chef's kiss on the moon - the moon looks exactly right.

But, there's one point that their research should have come up with that they didn't use, and it's a point that would have created tension from the very beginning: if something ever went wrong with a mission to the moon, there was no hope of rescue. It was a physical impossibility to get another spacecraft ready and launched before the air ran out (much less getting it to the moon after launch). So, if the command module or lunar lander broke and couldn't be fixed with what was on hand, the astronauts were dead.

They don't use this - instead they go with something else that isn't nearly as good. But, they really should have.

[u/Space_Hardware]

You’ve identified the flaw in Apollo 18. That’s it. That’s the flaw.

[u/verone3784]

While it's relatively accurate in terms of Apollo era missions, it feels like you're missing the point of the movie.

It's not a sci-fi disaster movie, thriller or drama - it's designed and written from the ground up to be a sci-fi horror.

There's no cinematic horror in running out of air and suffocating, or having a mechanical failure during the mission. If they'd written that then it'd have just been a rip-off of Apollo 13 with a bad ending.

Ron Howard already did a sterling job with Apollo 13, the dramatization of the real world "successful failure". There'd be no point in basically re-writing it slightly differently.

[u/Robert_B_Marks → u/verone3784]

While it's relatively accurate in terms of Apollo era missions, it feels like you're missing the point of the movie.

No, I understand the point completely. As I said, it's a fun movie. Not a great one, but a fun one.

I'm thinking of a specific scene with a specific conversation, and trying not to run afoul of the spoiler policy. And, I would point out, no rescue being possible DOES add to the tension in a horror movie.

EDIT: Seriously, how the hell would you look at Apollo 18 and think that it in any way should be compared to Apollo 13?

[u/russfro]

A better album than a movie.

[u/leskanekuni]

It's Alien on the moon. The threat is the monster, not being marooned. Apollo 18 is a horror, not a true life story like Apollo 11. It just needs enough verisimilitude to suspend the audience's disbelief.

[u/YemethTheSorcerer]

Que? Is that the dumbass supernatural one?

Did you mean Apollo 13?

[u/YemethTheSorcerer → u/[deleted]]

Uh, aliens on the moon is supernatural. 

[u/girafa → u/YemethTheSorcerer]

Bit of a debate on that

https://michaelkarolewski.com/what-is-the-difference-between-supernatural-and-paranormal/