Apollo 18 Movie: The Truth behind the Moon Mission

Was Apollo 18 real? Yes, it was real mission to the moon which was cancelled along with Apollo 19 and 20.

Apollo 18 was a lunar mission that was supposed to land in a “river” valley on the Moon known as Schroter’s Valley, but it had more bad luck than Apollo 13 (which we all know was made into a movie by Ron Howard). In more ways than one, Apollo 13 could have been be the luckiest Apollo lunar mission ever compared to Apollo 18.

Why should we consider Apollo 18 bad luck? It’s because it was planned with fear hanging in the air and as a result, it never took off. There were fears that the money to be appropriated to it may be used for more pressing needs; there were fears that the mission will cost the life of the mission astronauts; there were fear that the landing site just wasn’t right (there were plans to send it to the dark side of the moon). There were just too many things to consider and with so many factors going against it, Apollo 18 was simply scrapped, even when all the equipment and hardware needed to send the astronauts back to the moon was already waiting. So that’s the basic story about the failed moon mission that was Apollo 18.

But what if Apollo 18 wasn’t scrapped? What if it did launch and landed astronauts to the moon? What if it was a failure because of something else altogether? This is the premise of the movie Apollo 18, directed by Spanish filmmaker Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego from a screenplay by Brian Miller.

The movie Apollo 18 tells of a secret footage of astronauts on the moon that supposedly came from the Apollo 18 mission. For some reason, the launch was pushed through but kept secret one way or the other. The clip shows something that indicates there is something alive on the moon which affected the mission and which is supposedly the reason why the United States never went back (at least not yet). The old footage is said to have been found by Russian documentary filmmaker, Timur Bekmambetov (also the producer of Apollo 18) in Russian archives while doing research on the Russian Space Station for a film project. With the “secret”  footage found, Bekmambetov supposedly went to Bob Weinstein of Dimension Films who decided to fund production for the film after watching the footage. Is this the real story? Well, there are actually more pressing questions: What happened on the moon and why was the Apollo 18 launch kept secret? Better watch the movie to find out.

The movie Apollo 18 was made on a budget of only $5 million and was in production for only about four months prior to its release in April, 2011. It’s an ambitious project with a bootstrapped production-a trend that seems to be catching on in times of cutbacks on everything from the production catering to the visual effects. So is there anything big to expect from Apollo 18? This isn’t really the first time that a low-budget movie was made in the hopes that it will earn enough to be profitable. There are many examples of cheap movies that made it big. There’s The Blair Witch Project which may have inspired the makers of Apollo 18. The Blair Witch Project is similar to Apollo 13 in that both movies were made cheaply and had footage that’s hyped as real, and there’s a sinister something that destroys the plan of everyone.

Is Apollo 18 worth watching? Sure, why not? Any movie is worth watching if it serves the purpose of entertaining and there’s the plus of learning a thing or two about the history of lunar missions. It just may inspire people to become space scientists.

Astro Science Workshop

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