Parabolic Activity – Apollo 18

So, we actually decided to watch cable last night and came across a relatively recent film that we had wanted to see yet somehow managed not to (at the theatre). Of course, we’re getting to the cinema more often these days as they’ve figured out how to make the world’s best (and messiest) funnel cakes there – but we digress. The film we’re reviewing today is Apollo 18, otherwise known as “How to go to the Moon without anyone really knowing about it.”

The moon - it's rocky, cold and filled with pesky spiders

Apollo 18 is a found footage movie – which is code for they were too cheap to hire a cinematographer. Of course, we were somewhat perplexed as to how most of the footage could have been found considering most of the film blew up with the hapless astronauts who obviously needed more practice with orbital docking – but we’ll get to that later.

The movie begins with an interesting premise – namely that it seemed odd that the Apollo program was cancelled before sending the last three scheduled missions. All rockets had already been built and delivered – if you ever happen to drive south on I-65 through Huntsville AL, you can see one of them at the rest stop there. So, with that rocket we’ve accounted for one cancelled mission anyway – an ignoble end to America’s most powerful rocket ever built. Why did Nixon cancel the Apollo program – the movie suggests a partial explanation in that Apollo 18 was used for a secret DoD mission. We have a few theories of our own as to why Nixon cancelled the program:

• He wanted to use the Apollo rockets to spy on the Democratic National Committee
• He wanted to use the rockets to drop bombs really, really fast on North Vietnam (catch them before they can move).
• He wanted to send hippies like John Lennon into lunar exile.
• He wanted to find new sources of minerals in order to bring back the gold standard.
• He wanted to use them as really large fireworks to impress the Chinese.

Perhaps we may never really know why he did it. But in the movie the idea goes something like this – the Ruskies (AKA Soviet Union) have managed to send up their own lunar mission which runs into some sort of strange phenomena and the US sends a team of sacrificial spacemen to film whatever is happening up there.

The moon is spooky enough w/o having Bjork associated with it…

Once on the moon, it’s poltergeist meets Apollo 13. We’ve got these weird moon critters who apparently have their own radio transmitters because they’re always on there making funny noises, we’ve got flying rocks which like to jump into spacesuits and our hero astronauts dropping things and generally trying to scare each other a lot. Funny, they forgot to bring the jumping cat with them and of course there is no attic or basement to go into so basically it’s all scary. Anyway, we view the movie as a a sort of training exercise of what not to do on moon missions.

The top 10 list of things not to do on the moon:

1. Agree to go on secret moon missions.
2. Drive a lunar rover without seat belts.
3. Listen to Space Oddity, Rocketman, Major Tom or anything by David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust while on the moon or in space.
4. Collect moon rocks that move on their own or otherwise seem to be alive.
5. Go down into a deep dark crater without a flashlight
6. Stand next to a deep dark moon crater (with your back turned towards it).
7. Bunk next to a guy who just said he had something crawling inside his helmet while he was moon-walking (and we don’t mean the Michael Jackson kind of moon walking).
8. Open the lunar module and let in the guy with visible moon spiders crawling in his helmet.
9. Follow mysterious footprints on the moon (in a place where no man has walked before).
10. Try to rendezvous two spacecraft traveling at 12,000 miles an hour in orbit without using the brakes.

So now we’ve discovered where the moon spiders came from…

We think these are great moon safety tips and are truly thankful to Apollo 18 for pointing them out. We had blast watching this – it was far out – the finale was explosive – cheap pun alert…