Apollo 18 dull faux-doc

Mystery moon mission makes more mundane movie matinees

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The faux-documentary horror film has become its own subgenre, and familiarity with this particular storytelling conceit is starting to breed fatigue, if not contempt. Apollo 18 brings the Blairanormal Clovertivity into space, using footage supposedly taken from NASA’s archives and depicting a secret 1974 lunar voyage gone wrong. Three astronauts (Lloyd Owen, Ryan Robbins and Warren Christie) blast off thinking that their mission is to plant technology to spy on the Soviets. Once on the white rock, though, two of them encounter a lethal life form that threatens to make their trip a one-way affair. Characters are blandly rendered and director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego fails to take advantage of the claustrophobic dread the space setting could have inspired, his “found footage” yielding only a couple of decent, but forgettable, jolts.