Operation Avalanche
THE TINFOIL-HAT CROWD SHOULD SEE THIS
‘Have you heard of a conspiracy theory before?” asks CIA special agent Matt Johnson. To which his friend and fellow agent Owen Williams replies: “Yeah. I think we’re in one.”
Operation Avalanche is both a hilarious mockumentary and a tense thriller that dares to imagine what crazy people have been saying for 40 years: that Apollo astronauts never actually walked on the moon.
Director and co- writer Matt Johnson plays a version of himself, a whiz kid recruited by the CIA in the late 1960s, with equal parts ambition and stupidity. He’s just wrapped an investigation into Stanley Kubrick — “and in conclusion, Stanley Kubrick is not a spy.” Now he wants to infiltrate NASA posing as a documentary filmmaker, to learn the identity of a Soviet mole within t he American space agency.
Incredibly, Johnson and his cohorts did something similar in making this movie, going to the Johnson Space Center in Texas on the pretext of making a film about the real moon landing, only to walk out with footage of their alter egos planning a fake one.
When the mole- seeking “filmmakers” overhear NASA administrator James Webb saying the lunar module is too heavy to land on the moon, Johnson swings into action with a strategy to film the extravehicular activity in a studio, using Kubrick’s front-screen projection from 2001: A Space Odyssey, together with mock- up spacesuits and a model lunar module.
It’s everything conspiracy nuts have been going on about for decades, but played for laughs. Johnson worries about how to simulate l unar regolith; frets that the U. S. flag will flutter in an apparently airless environment; and labels rocks for easy placement. Some problems are more easily solved than others. How to do the experiment where a feather and a hammer fall at the same speed? Johnson shrugs: “Lead feather.”
Part of the joy in this caper is watching Johnson’s face cycle through degrees of disbelief and joy — he can’t believe he’s pulling this off, and on another level, neither can the real Johnson. “No one is going to think this is fake, because how insane would that be?” one of them says.
Things take a dark turn late in the movie as paranoia piles up and people get hurt. But by this point we’re ensconced in the escapade, with the result that the ending doesn’t fall as heavily as might have been intended.
Operation Avalanche is a mustsee for fans of the space program, though it may also draw its share of the aluminum- hat crowd. I’d recommend the latter especially to see it in the cinema, as they need to get out more. And to please not believe everything Johnson is telling you. ΩΩΩ1/2