Operation Avalanche (2016)

Oh boy... What a complete load of c''p.

This could have been an excellent film if they'd just gotten a decent cast, and not made it look like a few overly excited kids who'd gotten a movie camera for Christmas.

I'm quite into conspiracy films/documentaries; however, the only thing I am left thinking after watching this is where did that hour and-a-half really go to? Please believe other reviews telling you not to waste your time... I wish I had.

Found lost tapes movies are generally not my thing; and I can honestly say that I just wish this one had of remained lost. There is quite literally nothing good I can say about it. Acting (if you can call it that) is woeful, camera-work isn't a great deal better, and the overall feel of the whole watching experience became quite painful.

Maybe NASA could do us all a favour and include whoever was involved in the making of this trash on their next mission to Mars.... even Pluto would do!

Seriously folks.... Don't waste your time. Pathetic.

0/10 (A first for me).

Fmovies: I am the proud son of a proud retired NASA engineer. My Dad and his teammates, many of them fathers of my friends and neighbors in suburban Houston, Texas, helped put Americans on the moon. I grew up literally within sight of "The Site", the Manned Spacecraft Center. My position is biased, enthusiastic and completely Pro-US Space Program. Unabashed and unwavering.

So it will hardly come as a shock when I tell you that it offends me deeply when I hear that the July 20, 1969 moon landing was faked. That it was staged somewhere in the middle of a vast and barren desert of the American southwest. There are those who actually believed this then. There are those who believe it still today. And there will likely always be such conspiracy theorists.

As I watched the freshly released found-footage mockumentary "Operation Avalanche" I just could not get this notion out of my mind. The movie imagines a hoaxed lunar touchdown as fabricated in a warehouse by a group of enterprising young CIA agents. Several scenes were filmed on location at the Johnson Space Center and in front of the iconic Building 1, which is probably the most commonly recognized landmark amidst the facility. I have been to this place. My Dad worked in Building 1 among several other venues around the complex. I visited him in his office there as a kid. I fed the ducks and raced toy hydroplanes with him and the rest of my family in the ponds behind it. These places and these memories matter to me. A lot. And they are enduringly strong.

Good luck with your movie, guys. It is engaging for the most part. And I fully recognize that it's purely entertainment. But try telling my Dad that Neil Armstrong, whom my Dad knew personally, would ever go along with what you envisage in your story. Or that my father or any of the dedicated professionals he worked together with in tireless commitment to a purpose they all fiercely believed in at NASA would be complicit in any such insidious deception.

On second thought, don't. Or you would almost assuredly be looking at an "avalanche" the kind of which you can never even begin to imagine.

This hilarious "period-piece mockumentary" of NASA's Apollo landing hoax not only "talks the found-footage talk" (similar to Johnson's brilliant 2013 debut feature THE DiRTiES, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative at the Slamdance Film Festival) but his sophomore effort truly "walks the rebellious walk." Astoundingly shot in a purposefully grainy 16mm (that was blown up to HD) and looks remarkably like it was filmed in 1967, writer-director-actor Matt Johnson actually tricked modern day NASA officials into allowing him to film inside the real headquarters. This Q&A revelation after the world premiere screening was one of the festival's highlights.

Johnson explained "We contacted NASA and we told them we were making a 'documentary' about the Apollo program. They surprisingly agreed to let us film on the premises, so all of the scenes that are actually in the film, where I'm introducing myself as Matt, a documentary filmmaker? That was all real."

Johnson has crafted a genuine "Cold War" thriller here. And while there's a ton of cinematic references — that go well beyond the obvious Stanley Kubrick surface — keep a close-eye open for each movie poster hanging on walls. They each seem to significantly (and psychologically) relate to a different character. But nothing can prepare you for the film's climactic, single-shot driving scene that now ranks pretty damn high on my favorite chase sequences in film history. This is not just a young Canadian filmmaker to watch; Matt Johnson is a genuine force who has now completed two fully realized films that contemporary audiences should embrace.

Operation Avalanche fmovies. Seen at the Viennale 2016: It seems that Matt Johnson, an exaggerated enthusiastic filmmaker, had a lot of fun doing this movie. He was able to transfer his enthusiasm onto the movie and the movie was able to transfer it to the Viennese audience. There are a lot of meta levels in the making of this mock documentary. The movie content is based upon the crazy conspiracy theories surrounding the first moon-landing. The main level just shows a documentary that shows the tricks that had to be played that the whole world believed that the landing was real. One sub level is that Johnson interviewed the real NASA in tricky ways to get answers in the right direction, so he was able to include that footage into his movie. Another level is the story of the camera team that develops this story in the movie itself. Johnson is the director of the film crew in the movie and also the director of The Avalanche. Another story is about politics and the power of state to hide its secrets. Even footage of Stanley Kubrick could be used. Quite entertaining. But most impressing: the pictures showing the moon mission of Apollo itself. The result is a homage about this great decade of the US flying to the moon. The mock documentary is not faultless, but quite good entertainment. And also added is a low-budget car chase - a real highlight to see.

Operation Avalanche is a mockumentary/found footage genre movie which really twists the genre around and brings along an interesting point of facts. Some people call it the most illegal movie ever made which it does almost live up to.

This movie focuses how the USA could not land a man on the moon and how 2 CIA agents find this out and how they think up of an idea which really makes you wonder. The film consists of many funny moment, an intense car chase and a cluster of interesting ideas from the 1960s and references to the future.

The fantastic actors, clever script and good plot make up for the low budget it had.

Definitely a must watch!

An extremely ambitious addition to the emerging mumblecore genre, Operation Avalanche proposes that in 1967, a small group of young film-making CIA agents were responsible for 'faking' Apollo 11's landing on the moon by staging and shooting it on a sort of makeshift movie set. What makes this a great concept is the film's ambition, which ironically, is what also makes it completely fail on so many levels; for instance, actors seem to behave too much like themselves and not as characters resulting in things like them speaking as if they're from a different era than intended which, coupled with inconsistent costuming, is both jarring and shoddy. Filmmaker Matt Johnson simply bites off more than he can chew with his 'found footage' brainchild and audiences by the end of it will be like, "Houston, we want a refund."