NASA Just Wants to Make Sure You Know That 'Apollo 18' Is Not Real

Source: LA Times

by Ethan Anderton

With no advance press screenings and a last minute trailer released earlier this week, it's no surprise that Apollo 18 is sitting sloppily with a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this writing. But before you see the flick yourself this weekend, the folks from NASA just want to make sure that you don't buy the faux reality of the film purporting to be comprised of real found footage from a classified mission to the moon that supposedly took place in 1972. Bert Ulrich, NASA's liaison for multimedia, film and TV collaborations says, "Apollo 18 is not a documentary. The film is a work of fiction, and we always knew that." Read on!

Ulrich goes on and attempts to distance himself and the program from the film (something viewers may do if the negative reviews keep pouring in) as he told the LA Times, "We were minimally involved with this picture. We never even saw a rough cut. The idea of portraying the Apollo 18 mission as authentic is simply a marketing ploy. Perhaps a bit of a Blair Witch Project strategy to generate hype." With no rockets to launch, I'm glad NASA has the time to debunk this film as pure fiction. But frankly, since they didn't speak out about Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon, maybe that means there are robots in disguise hidden beneath our satellite's surface? NASA better start sifting through all the sci-fi films of the past to let me know what's fake and real, otherwise, I'll be absolutely lost.