Operation Avalanche

If you’re left wondering whether a film is supposed to be funny, it’s a fair bet that if it was, it didn’t succeed – and if it wasn’t, but you thought it might be, then that’s even worse. Operation

Avalanche ticks all the wrong boxes. It’s “found footage”, which means shaky hand-held camera, poor angles and dodgy sound throughout. It’s ludicrously amateurish in almost every way – the plotting, the dialogue, the acting, the directing. The story is a ridiculously improbable variant on a conspiracy theory that’s been around for decades.

It’s 1967. The CIA has recruited a few young film graduates for some sort of PR project. There’s a suspicion that NASA has been infiltrated by a mole feeding Top Secret information to the Russians, so the boys are sent into NASA to do a bit of spying while ostensibly shooting a documentary about the Space Race. After bugging a few phones they discover that senior people at NASA know that the proposed Moon landing, as promised by JFK in 1962, can’t happen; the Moon lander can’t carry enough fuel to take off again. One of the lads, Matt Johnson, comes up with the idea of faking some film of the astronauts walking on the Moon. Everything else will be real, including Apollo 11 orbiting the Moon – only the landing will be faked. Even Mission Control at Houston needn’t know; the “landing” will occur (or not) on the dark side of the Moon, when the astronauts are out of touch with Earth, so Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins can simply beam the fake footage back when they’re ready. How do our guys manage to create said footage? They nip over to Britain, slip onto the set at Stanley Kubrick’s filming of 2001:

A Space Odyssey, and “borrow” his front-projection techniques.

There are so many holes in the plot, from beginning to end, that the storyline has no credibility at all. Would the CIA really send young rookies into NASA to hunt out a Russian mole? Does no one ever mind this junior film crew wandering around Top Secret establishments with cameras? Can two or three of them really fake the footage so no one will suspect? How can they manage it without NASA knowing? Who are the guys who keep spying on them, and eventually attack them in a car chase shoot-out?

Young Canadian Matt Johnson is director, co-producer, co-writer and lead actor (as himself); his previous film, The

Dirties, which was about school bullying, cost $10,000 to make and won a number of awards.

Operation Avalanche’s apologists would probably describe it as an art movie about cinematic manipulation of the perception of reality; more prosaically, it’s a mockumentary on the making of a hoax; more realistically, it’s a mess.

Operation Avalanche scores highly on one thing: the feel of the Sixties. Partly this is down to the clothes, cars and hairstyles, of course, and partly the lighting, and cinematography, which achieves a convincing period look.