Short answers, pulled from the story.
The film is based on the premise that the cancelled Apollo 18 mission secretly landed on the Moon in December 1974 on a top-secret Department of Defense mission to place an early warning detector for Soviet ICBM attacks, but the crew never returned. It is a found footage horror film written by Brian Miller and directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego.
The crew consists of Commander Nathan Walker (played by Lloyd Owen), Captain Ben Anderson (played by Warren Christie), and Lieutenant Colonel John Grey (played by Ryan Robbins). Walker and Anderson land on the Moon in the lunar module Liberty while Grey remains in the command module Freedom.
Apollo 18 earned a worldwide gross of just over 26.2 million dollars against a five million dollar budget, making it a financial success. It opened at number three in its first weekend, earning over 8.7 million dollars across 3,328 theaters.
Critics gave it mostly negative reviews. It holds a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 75 reviews and a score of 24 out of 100 on Metacritic. Most reviewers compared it unfavorably to The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and audiences gave it a D grade on CinemaScore.
Yes. The Nixon and Ford Administrations gave away 135 Apollo 11 Moon rocks and 135 Apollo 17 goodwill Moon rocks to foreign dignitaries. A project started at the University of Phoenix in 2002, involving over a thousand graduate students, found that 160 of those rocks are unaccounted for, lost, or destroyed.
Apollo 18 was released on the 2nd of September 2011 in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. It was directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego and was his first English-language film. The release date had been moved ten times between 2010 and 2011.