Apollo 18 [Blu-Ray]

Do not see this movie, unless you seek the most egregious affront to the usage of time available to your eyeballs. A novel enough concept for a "found footage" horror flick, Apollo 18 squanders its potential on an indistinctly assembled collection of boring, grainy shots, bland characters and half-baked, ineffectual attempts at tension building. The supposed story is of a secret mission to the moon, cobbled together from footage anonymously uploaded to the Internet, to help the gullible suspend their disbelief. A conceit used effectively in The Blair Witch Project, here the overtly shitty-looking film quality makes viewing all the more torturous. I understand the notion that this is supposed to be degraded film stock, but I can't discern any logical reasoning for the sheer number of disparate looks used. Why would a top secret NASA mission have so many different camera types on board? It wouldn't, and it looks horrible; it's just a terrible creative decision that isn't sufficiently explained in the delusional feature commentary with the director and editor. The idea of uncovering the secret of why there have been no more missions to the moon is a good one, but the script fails to capitalize on the inherent tension of existing myths, and the semi-decent, semi-original ideas it introduces late in the story are so sloppily handled and the scares so contrived that any chance of injecting a sense of worth into this cumbersome patchwork of crappy scenes is long gone. It feels like a chore just to sit through the film's brief run time and with such a lame resolution, there's no reward for patience. With four alternate endings and a shit-load of deleted and alternate scenes, it's pretty clear that mission control was all but clueless about the ultimate purpose of this misguided endeavour.