There are people on the moon and they control human affairs. They do this by traveling through time and altering past events to create a new and supposedly better future. They are led by J. Ari Hilliard, founder of the Church of Lunology and discoverer of the secret of immortality. Don't believe me? Check out Lunopolis, Matthew J. Avant's 2009 "documentary," to be released on DVD by Walking Shadows October 11.
French academic Jean Francois Champollion VI, having discovered in 1992 a collection of videotaped footage shot by some university students, pieces together the story of what happened in the 12 days leading up to December 21, 2012 (yes, the very day supposedly predicted by the Mayan calendar to be the end of the world as we know it). Champollion helpfully surrounds this found footage with the testimony of experts who fill in the gaps and explain the complex concepts involving time travel and parallel worlds which underlie the grand conspiracy laid out by the film.
Like most found-footage movies, Lunopolis aims to create an air of reality and conviction around a fantastic story. What distinguishes Avant's movie from most others of its kind is the inclusion of the extra contextual material to expand on and explain the found footage. Generally, viewers are left to form their own opinions, but here we have something closer in form to a conventional documentary. This is both a strength and a weakness, however. Found-footage films are a game played with the audience, aimed at assisting us in suspending our disbelief.
While the approach used by Avant allows him to lay out some fairly elaborate concepts which would be more difficult to explain if he had stuck strictly to the students' found footage, we know that much of what the “experts” are talking about is not actually true (the Church of Lunology, for instance, is an obvious pastiche of Scientology, with J. Ari Hilliard standing in for L. Ron Hubbard), so the more overt documentary material actually undermines the found-footage narrative by emphasizing the fictional nature of the film – exactly the opposite of the effect the found-footage technique aims to create.
It's difficult to write about a film like Lunopolis without talking about the plot to some degree, so be warned: there may be spoilers ahead.
After a brief, somewhat cryptic television news report about a viral Internet video which may or may not show some kind of supernatural event at a shopping mall, we are introduced to Matt (director Matthew Avant) and Sonny (Hal Maynor). These two young filmmakers are embarking on a documentary investigation triggered by a panicked phone call to a late night conspiracy-themed show in which a terrified voice talks of people on the moon who are controlling world events. The follow-up arrival of some documents, including a strange Polaroid photo with GPS coordinates written on the back, leads them to a partially submerged cabin in a Louisiana swamp beneath which they discover a vast, seemingly deserted installation. Deep inside they find an odd machine which they take back to the university.
Article comments
1 - Zaporini Perete
this movie insults my intel
2 - Speusippus
I did not think it was a particularly awesome movie, but the talking heads problem I think can be given a resolution within the framework of the film--I took those sequences to be from a different timeline (the film calls them "dimensions") than the one inhabited by the documentarian protagonists. The facts about lunopolis were unknown to the protagonists, and known to the experts, because the experts (and the newscasters at the beginning) inhabit a different (and in the film's terms "later" or "higher") timeline than the documentarians.