Day: December 23, 2011

I think everyone knows about Apollo 18 by now. A “Shaky cam” and “security cam” based movie. Of what? Of the Apollo 18 mission that was “canceled”, due to budget reasons.

Or was it?

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

So of course in this movie, it wasn’t canceled, just kept secret. Why? Because shit goes down that they want to keep secret. And no, they don’t find any old transformers.

One guy has to stay up in orbit (Ryan Robbins) and the other two are on the moon (Warren Christie and Lloyd Owen).

They just have to collect some rocks? But then things go missing, they get scared, and paranoid, and it is all captured as they try to escape and fail. Yay.

I thought the beginning was super super slow. Really, I didn’t think it got interesting until the very end, then of course it ended. Making it very disappointing. The geologist in me is also displeased though.

Also, this guy.

This is supposed to have been edited down from 86~ hours of footage, over many many devices, and posted onto a fake website. (The website didn’t work for me. That is dumb…) And then made into this movie so everyone could get the truth.

Well if that was the case too, it would have worked better as a 10 minute thing, and not intentionally using the bad camera angles available. Don’t give me this “so the public can know!” message, and then try to make a (non scary) horror movie as the message conveyance. Would have rather had that explanation not as part of it.

Final Destination 5? The Final Final Destination? (No, not really. Apparently if this did well, there’d be two filmed at the same time? Not sure if that has been decided yet.) As far as I know though, it doesn’t really matter. You can always make a new movie about a group of people who escape death, and end up dying in gruesome ways. Pretty much writes itself!

Don’t look too shocked. Your role could have been done by anyone!

What is the big event this time? A bridge collapse. The main group of people all work for or are related to people at some company going on an outing. A nice bus and all. The main character is Nicholas D’Agosto. He has a vision of most everyone die, except for his girlfriend Emma Bell, who he manages to save. Needless to say, after he sees all this, he freaks out and saves some people from the bus (the others are like, what?). This includes his good friend, Miles Fisher, his lady friend, Ellen Wroe, and the guy at the office no one likes, P.J. Byrne. We also have hot office mate, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, new guy who runs the factory despite age, Arlen Escarpeta, and everyone’s boss, David Koechner! Eight in all.

Eight? That’s a pretty good number of people who are going to probably die then. There is also the detective assigned to the case, Courtney B. Vance, who I only remember from being in that one season of FlashForward.

As you all know, I am not a usual horror watcher. But nothing else is really coming out this week, so I said screw it. The only other FD I have seen was the second one, and parts of the third. General knowledge of the first. I was told that this one relates to the others, and it is good to see them. But I don’t want to see them!

So I did the next best thing, read the plot outlines on Wikipedia! Do not do this. The plot outlines, in an attempt to relate all the movies, kind of spoil the ending of this movie. I didn’t know I had it spoiled, until the ending happened. And went “Oh! That was the twist! Well shit.”

For shame Wiki. For shame.

Who dies while getting a massage? Seriously?

So, I was sufficiently scared during this movie, I think. I definitely found everything to be pretty gruesome, which makes me mad that I watched this during lunch time. Filmmakers did a good job of throwing a lot of red herrings at our faces, trying to figure out just how they would die. Usually you’d be wrong.

That gymnastics scene in particular was the biggest tease. I also disliked that during the credits, they showed footage of the other movie deaths all back to back and crazy, probably just to give the 3D viewers and extra whoa! I didn’t need it all at once though, myself.

I think fans of the series would enjoy this one. The acting wasn’t the best, but I cared enough about some of the characters to make me hope they’d survive. Damn death.