Faking Reality

     This past weekend I saw the new film Apollo 18.  It was a good movie, a great idea, good acting   (crapy ending), but the most interesting thing was that throughout the entire movie, both before and after, it pretended that it was an actual collection of leaked footage from the government.  This seems to be a phenomena that has taken hold since the Blair Witch Project. Thriller movies pretending to be based on true events.

   
 This is different than a Mocumentary.  A mocumentary is a fiction film that presents itself as a documentary, they are usually a satire or a parody, and almost always comedic.  The new trend of thriller films that present themselves as fact are serious or scary. Films like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield are filmed in such a way as to appear to be raw footage.  Apollo 18 uses this technique as well, as if the footage we are seeing was originally filmed by those in the movie.  Some films take this a little to far.  The Fourth Kind is a film about an alien abduction and the film makers made it seem as if it were real.  they even went through the trouble of have two lead actresses, one as the "Real" women in "Historical" footage, and another to be the actress playing the "real" woman in the dramatizations.  They faked news releases and created a website of facts so that if you looked into the film it would seem true.  They even went as far as to not credit the actress who played the "Real" women in the historical footage, to make her seem like a real person.
 
 This new take on thrillers is an interesting trend.  I believe that this way of marketing and presenting a story makes more people want to see it. Inside every viewer is a little part of them that wants movies to be true.  So if the film presents itself as true, it makes it more interesting and gives it an edge.  I feel that in the near future we will see many more films that are completely fictitious but present themselves as factual, simply because it sells.