posted 09-02-2011 07:40 PM               

Apollo 18's real-life NASA flight director

Every movie has a director, but for "Apollo 18," opening in theaters today (Sept. 2), a mere film director wasn't enough. To launch the "found footage" from a secret moon landing gone horrifically awry, "Apollo 18" needed a NASA flight director.

Enter Gerry Griffin...

posted 09-02-2011 09:13 PM               

Apollo 18 has the cachet of independent cinema, a film d'auteur as it were. This is a "found footage" movie, a filmwriting genre similar to The Blair Which Project. I liked its minimalist approach, mostly devoid of sensationalism and off-the-point sideplots. I found that the interpolation of NASA stock footage with studio clips was ingenious, as was video and audio post-processing. In fact during most of the movie, the viewer witnesses the action up close, in space, from the claustrophobic – and realistic -- confines of spacecraft and spacesuits.

The requisite visual and aural elements of the Apollo iconography we would expect here – Quindar tones, logos, decals, instruments and all the rest, down to a mission insigna – are tastefully blended with made-up, late-1970's technological improvements such as "Westinghouse motion-detection cameras" with early mini-servos… albeit the crew setting up on the surface still sends its regard to "Captain Video"!

It felt to me the whole time as if I was embedded as a fourth crewman in the command module "Freedom" or in the LM christened "Liberty". I really got off on the dramatic shot angles the filmmakers availed themselves to in cockpit scenes. The effects for zero-g of orbit and one-sixth gravity of EVAs and lunar stay are represented without ostentation. In fact, one feels that deliberate consideration was applied not to overload literary and sensory impact.

As an aficionado of the history of astronautics, I just know that someone in this production knew their stuff, or got into it with gusto: Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin's time as a technical adviser hasn't been wasted. I haven't really seen much blatant misrepresentation – or literary misuse -- of historical events, techniques and people, besides a few compromises that keep the plot flowing. Space fans will recognize panels and labels, layouts and materials, idiosyncrasies and lingo.

posted 09-02-2011 09:22 PM               

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Originally posted by mercsim:
I went to see the movie today. I'm not a scary movie fan and didn't see Blair.

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posted 09-02-2011 10:43 PM              

Gerry was the host/moderator at the ASF Apollo 15 event, and it was great to meet him and hear him talk. Amazing life.

posted 09-03-2011 02:56 AM               

Okay, let's see now. Given my prior interest in this type of stuff, it still took me about one hour just to take in those twenty-one pages and to run quick-and-dirty mental checks on their semantic and historical realism. I say that, so far, they pass, albeit I'd need a few more hours' worth of time to attest more authoritatively that they're all good fakes, not contradicting each other or any of the many such documents I've gotten to view through the years.

Now let's recall that during the alleged successful American lunar landings, documentation just like that had to be faked, i.e. "generated" in order to cover-up the faked lunar landings which were recreated in secret movie studios. Just for those twenty-one pages, it probably took dozens, if not hundreds of skilled hours/person of work from a team of researchers, writers, editors and printers specialized in facsimile. The deliciously subversive, scholarly-structured two-page excerpt from the faked book "Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs" alone must have taken a good afternoon's worth of writing and revision.

Bear with me just a bit more here. Like many, I actually collect this stuff, this fake Apollo-related printed documentation. I'm still a young collector, yet, I'd say I own several thousand times those twenty-one pages in real, heavy paper documents such as pictures, booklets and manuals that even smell like someone else's 1960's... I have so much of this that I have been known to give piles of it at times.

Piffle. Many a collector from collectSPACE's readership have enough to make floors buckle and home insurers cringe. The most seriously afflicted collectors, in ill-advised, desperate attempts to unload some of their boxes of printed material, become dedicated resellers, ending up in effect in the dutiful custody of tons, literally, of the stuff. In those household, wife and children wage loosing battles to this growing blob of binded paper and cardboard.

But if the reader is really serious about this, he or she will eventually visit Houston, TX, which is after all the world capital of spaceflight deception. At neighbouring U of H in Clear Lake, one can peruse the Apollo Archive. One of the most comprehensive library of Apollo's documentation, the huge collection is an institutional tribute to the old adage to the effect that "before an aircraft [and by extension, a spacecraft] can take off, it will have generated its own weight in paperwork." Let me assure you that this holds true for faked missions too!

I did just that a few years back, that is, to spend five full days, from sunrise to sunshine, as a visiting scholar inside that most amazing library. What exhilarating reading I did! I walked out of there with twenty ponds of photocopies, fifty pages of handwritten notes, and hundreds of kilobits of typed notes on my old Macintosh Powerbook. At the end of this, I was drained.

Each time I reminisce of the linear miles of material archived in that one place. I feel the pain of having hardly made a dent. That Friday evening, I left Houston with one sobering conviction: even if I were to outlive myself ten times, I would never get to read "all" that was ever written while faking Apollo.

Or flying Apollo, as it were. In matters of printed documentation as in other costly considerations, successfully faking lunar landings would have taken no less resources than successfully flying them did.

I traveled through the entire USA. I saw hundreds of rockets and rocket parts. I've found my way inside most the NASA "centers" and famous aerospace-related schools and universities. I've even met several so-called "moonwalkers", and most of them looked reasonably convincing in their pretenses.

posted 09-03-2011 10:06 AM               

'Apollo 18,' a drab combination of science-fiction horror film and conspiracy thriller, accomplishes something the world wasn’t really crying out for: it recreates the tedium of watching the later Apollo missions.

posted 09-05-2011 01:32 PM               

"Apollo 18" is the latest movie this year from Weinstein Co.'s Dimension Films label -- after "Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D" and "Scream 4" -- to underperform.

The sci-fi film, which purports to show "found footage" from a U.S. space mission, has no major stars. Its mysterious marketing campaign revealed little about the film's story. The movie received a dismal average grade of D from movie-goers, indicating they may have expected something quite different from what they got. Those who saw the movie were 57% male, and 56% were under age 25.

posted 09-06-2011 09:35 AM               

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Originally posted by Fra Mauro:
Did you catch the nasty comment, "the tedium of watching the later Apollo missions."

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A nasty comment indeed. However, it doesn't alter the fact that NASA was paying TV stations to cover mission highlights for the later Apollo flights such was the lack of interest in them.

posted 09-06-2011 10:25 AM               

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Originally posted by moorouge:
However, it doesn't alter the fact that NASA was paying TV stations to cover mission highlights for the later Apollo flights such was the lack of interest in them.

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posted 09-08-2011 08:36 PM               

Like many sci-fi films, Apollo 18 requires a suspension of belief in that the plot is preposterous.

Once past that, the film is very well done. I could niggle about some of the details (the LM interior was actually smaller than what was depicted), but there was good attention to detail that made the movie seem like a 1970's period piece.

The tension necessary for a sci fi thriller was there and kept me on the edge of my seat (despite the fact that the ending was somewhat predictable).

The actors, although not well known stars, did an excellent job.

posted 09-12-2011 02:37 PM            

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Originally posted by Rizz:
How do you figure all of that 'classified' film footage made it back to Earth?

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posted 09-12-2011 04:29 PM               

I spent more time explaining it's not like that, but rather a fictional story simply for entertainment. He's too pragmatic to enjoy it.

That being said, I felt like this would have made a really great Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode.

I did enjoy the photography and historical inserts though.

But the cliches were way overboard too.

posted 09-23-2011 06:39 PM               

There never was a DoD-dedicated Apollo mission and no astronauts named Anderson, Walker or Grey were ever selected for NASA's astronaut corps, as the movie depicts, or failed to return from the moon.