The Landing
Mark and David Dodson’s astronaut mystery, “The Landing,” takes on the tone and probing style of an Errol Morris documentary while it theorizes about a fictional Apollo 18 moon mission. The Apollo 18 mission was one of the moon-exploration flights that was cancelled as the space shuttle missions took over, and budget cuts happened, but people have done at least one or two previous films speculating about one. One was found footage, and supposedly awful, in 2011 (I never saw it), but the Dodsons’s film is a fascinating thriller, and definitely worth checking out.
“The Landing” takes place in 1998, 25 years after the film’s Apollo 18 mission took place, and command module pilot Bo Cunningham (Don Hannah) has lived a solitary life in Colorado in the years after the Apollo 18 crew came home from the moon. He is the only one still alive; the other two astronauts, Ed Lovett and Al Borden, died after a freak occurrence during re-entry forced Bo to land the capsule in a desert in China. Not long after they have miraculously landed, Ed and Al become delusional, and die shortly after. That’s the official record, however; you ask some of the people who investigated the incident in 1973, and you get a very different picture of Cunningham, and what happened to two American heroes.
If you enjoy a good conspiracy thriller, “The Landing” delivers the goods. I wouldn’t rate it with something like “JFK” or Frankenheimer’s “Seconds,” but Mark and David Dodson, as co-writers and directors, have come up with a pretty great hook here that sucks you in. They actually started filming this in 1991 (I’m guessing all the 1973 footage) before picking it back up 25 years later to add to the film’s authenticity, and the idea that they did that makes it all the more compelling to watch how effectively they pull this off, because it feels very fluid and natural how they put it all together. The 1973 footage and landing area photos feel authentic and seeing the actors revisit some of the characters with that quarter century remove makes this one of the best uses of the faux documentary, or “found footage,” format someone has come up with. While we think we figure out the truth as we watch the film unfold, we’re not quite sure how things add up here, and that’s a great place to leave an audience with a movie like this. The Dodsons have created a thriller that sucks you in, and makes you wonder what’s real, and what’s not, even when your intellect tells you certain things are absolutely true…like the fact that an Apollo 18 mission never took place.
