In the interest of getting “hard” copies of my work under one roof, I plan to spend the next few weeks posting the entire archive of my film journalism here on ScullyVision. With due respect to the many publications I’ve written for, the internet remains quite temporary, and I’d hate to see any of my work disappear for digital reasons. As such, this gargantuan project must begin! I don’t want to do it. I hate doing it. But it needs to be done. Please note that my opinions, like everyone’s, have changed a LOT since I started, so many of these reviews will only represent a snapshot in time. Objectivity has absolutely no place in film criticism, at least not how I do it.
Operation Avalanche is impossible to describe, but I’ll certainly try. It’s a found footage flick, even though it’s not, set in the years leading up to the moon landing, about a handful of low-level CIA operatives who go undercover to investigate a potential mole at NASA. They pose as a documentary film crew, but when their work leads them to discover that Kennedy’s dream of putting a man on the moon before decade’s end is not going to happen, they receive a new mission: fake the moon landing.
Here’s the thing, director/star Matt Johnson and his crew actually did infiltrate NASA to get a bunch of their footage. By posing as student filmmakers doing a project on the space race, they managed to do in real life what their fictional counterparts were tasked with doing on screen: lie convincingly. This is doubly wild considering that somehow, the inner workings of NASA fit perfectly into the 1960s stylings.
If ever an argument for more funding could be made…
What begins as a clever comedy morphs into a Cold War paranoia thriller as Johnson (he and his character share the same name) and his team get in way over their heads. When you’re trying to pull off the biggest hoax in history, a slight misstep can turn even the most devoted collaborator into a loose end, and loose ends tend to get clipped.
The high concept burns out a bit before the end, and I get the sense that this is due to the filmmakers not really having an ending in mind. Even so, the concept is so alluring – and the filmmakers have such fun with it – that it’s hard to fault a small pacing issue. Especially when the found footage aspect of it looks so genuine. Anytime a digitally shot film attempts to recreate the scratches and cigarette burns of celluloid it fails. It’s too easy to see the artifice, but somehow Operation Avalanche pulls it off. It looks and feels genuine. Johnson really is a fantastic liar.
He’s also a fantastic action choreographer. Operation Avalanche features one of the most intense, visceral, and exciting car chases I’ve ever seen. It comes out of nowhere and it’s as exciting as anything the Fast Fambly has ever put forth. YES I KNOW THAT IS EXTREMELY HIGH PRAISE AND I STAND BY IT.
It’s a minor film, just as it needs to be, and it really is its very own beast. There’s nothing else quite like it. A piece of me wants to compare it to Neil Burger’s Interview With the Assassin, which wouldn’t be entirely invalid, as both are handheld conspiracy thrillers, but Avalanche takes a tone that is so much more, for lack of a better term, festive. There’s an energy here that I can only assume will give the film maximum rewatch value. There are no surprises or twists or anything like that, so to revisit the film will serve only to provide a chance for further investigation on the viewer’s part. I suspect that this will yield much reward, especially for film nerds and film technicians. And for what it’s worth, you really should go see this one on the big screen.
After the screening, the Johnson led a short Q&A during which he was asked if he though that there were any chance the moon landing was faked. “No,” he said, “we just thought it would make a wicked story.”
