The Weinstein Company’s “found footage” thriller Apollo 18 has taken such a long time to reach theaters, clearly there is only one conclusion you could reach: that its revelations about our last, top-secret mission to the moon angered NASA, which had successfully kept Apollo 18 and all of the supernatural, shaky-cam shenanigans that happened there off the history books for nearly 30 years, until Russian director-producer Timur Bekmambetov finally got hold of the truth. Or, at least, that’s the apparent assumption that’s been made by NASA officials, who felt the need to let everyone know officially that the whole “found footage” thing might just be a gimmick intended to sell a horror movie.
“Apollo 18 is not a documentary," NASA liaison Bert Ulrich informs the L.A. Times, probably sternly, as this is serious. "The film is a work of fiction, and we always knew that. 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." Yes, perhaps—or perhaps that’s just what they want you to think. After all, NASA hasn’t exactly been straightforward this summer, considering it also granted Michael Bay permission to film parts of Transformers: Dark Of The Moon at the Kennedy Space Center, thereby implicitly endorsing its “Neil Armstrong met giant robots on the moon” theory. But hey, what’s really important is that the guys at NASA got to do something today. [via Movieline]