Apollo 18

Meh.

Saw it yesterday. It was entertaining. Neither Ben or I felt cheated for spending $5.00 on a matinee showing. We might have felt different had we paid full price.

Dark and brooding, based on the interesting—if somewhat unbelievable premise that's been floating around the dark conspiracy-ridden corners of the interwebs for years (just Google Apollo 18, 19, or 20)—that the reason we've never been back to the moon is that we encountered something so awful there that it could never be publicly revealed.

It's presented as "real" in the same manner as The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield—in this case the film having been "pieced together from footage anonymously uploaded" to a website.

But the overall believability was immediately diminished for me when I recognized two of the "astronauts" as being actors (Lloyd Owen and Warren Christie) I've seen numerous times before; Christie actually plays a regular character on SyFy's current series Alphas…

Of course, after you see how the movie ends, you immediately find yourself wondering how any of this "real" footage—a lot of it supposedly transferred from 16mm film—ever made it back to earth to begin with. When I looked at Ben and asked that, he just turned to me and raising a finger to his lips said, "Shhh!"