Put simply, Operation Avalanche is a thrilling cinematic experience. It’s that rare film capable of evoking a series of wide-ranging emotions while remaining engrossing, adhering with unflinching fidelity to the parameters of its own sharply delineated diegesis. Matching this is a sense of humor simultaneously serving as the foundation of the entire plotline— both the film and its characters are perpetually (and often literally) winking at the screen—and yet manages to not overwhelm a tense narrative with cloying jokes. Operation Avalanche’s truest subject is filmmaking itself, as the film serves as both a paean to past works and a demonstration of the social and cultural efficacy of “movie magic.”
The narrative premise of Operation Avalanche is simple: NASA, at the height of the space race, has a Soviet mole. The CIA in response deploys a team of agents pretending to be documentarians to Houston to flush out the spy. The four-man team instead finds out NASA cannot put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In the spirit of preserving US morale against the Soviets, agent team leader Matt Johnson (played by Matt Johnson) hatches an audacious scheme to utilize the team’s film equipment to fake the moon landing. What ensues is classic spy-film shenanigans, replete with conspiracies, double crosses and car chases.
What makes the film work so well is that it is shot as a found footage documentary. The CIA team is composed of actors playing themselves. The cinematography is solely the photography of the agent team’s cameramen. In fact, the nature of the photography changes, in both aspect ratio and color, as the team gets new cameras over the course of the film. Near the end, there is a scene of Johnson—working here as director, co-writer and lead—in the editing room cutting together the film that the viewers are watching. The film’s firm adherence to its own rules is most extreme in a side story featuring Stanley Kubrick. Johnson (the character) goes to London to visit Kubrick’s 2001 set. There he speaks to the director who, rather than casting an actor to portray Kubrick, is presented via animated photos of Kubrick himself. In the name of authenticity, the film then presents a “real” Kubrick.
This highlights both the film’s indelible sense of humor and its ode to cinema. The laughs, found in nearly every scene, come from the film’s care in maintaining its preposterous premise: namely that of being a found footage documentary. That Johnson and his collaborators are so brash to create such a film is funny in the first place and they realize this, so they keep the whole production light-hearted. Everyone involved is clearly having a blast. The real/fake Kubrick is just par for the course. The script is littered with an amused self-awareness towards the believability of the on-screen imagery, the persuasiveness of special effects and the characters’ refusal to acknowledge being part of a conspiracy theory. Johnson is careful not to take the jokes too far, instead retaining an organic rather than forced feel that never overwhelms the film’s in-itself-hilarious serious tone.
In addition to numerous Kubrick homages and references—his “appearance” in the film, his being investigated on suspicion of communism because of Dr. Strangelove and a poster of Lolita in the background of several shots— Operation Avalanche also pays tribute to several other thematically similar films including both The Conversation and The Bourne Identity, as well as the whole sub-genre of moon-landing conspiracy films (most overtly Dark Side of the Moon (2002 version)) and the mid-1960s works of Fellini and Antonioni. There is even a scene dedicated to Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, through which Johnson (the character) steels his resolve in order to proceed with his fake moon landing.
Because of this, Operation Avalanche is less about the moon landing than it is about filmmaking itself. The moon landing itself is never actually shown, the implication being the
historical moon landing itself existing solely as a televised cultural event. This is the true genius of Operation Avalanche: the idea of a fake, filmed moon landing being completely plausible as the event itself has only been experienced through film. Throughout his film, Johnson (the person) explores the ontological status of the image and interrogates the connection humans have to screens and the implications of their images: Why do we believe what we see in images in certain contexts and deny it in others?
Like its cinematic forebear on this question, Blow-Up, Operation Avalanche is ambiguous with its answer. On one level, it deconstructs film effects, pulling back the curtain to reveal how the tricks are performed. On another, it manipulates the audience’s tendency to view self-proclaimed nonfictional images as truth as an intrinsic part of its own narrative. It magnificently portrays the sociopolitical gravity of the actual Apollo 11 mission from 1969, the emotional importance cast upon the moon landing by an earnest US public and effectively stirs in the viewer a sense of the immense scale of that accomplishment. It feels like a nonfictional portrait of the wonder people felt in response to the Apollo program, which speaks to the quality of the filmmaking on display here. When watching the film, the stakes of the real-life space race are obvious. This is helped by archival footage of Kennedy’s stirring September 1962 speech at Rice University promising NASA would reach the moon before 1970. In this, part of the film’s narrative power and emotional heft lies in its use of nonfictional screen culture.
It is important to stress that all of this is done gleefully and with real humor rather than scholastic seriousness. Operation Avalanche is brazenly ambitious in its scope, both narratively and philosophically, and hits its marks in both. But it is its levity, borne from metafictional homages and winks, that makes it so fun and worthwhile. It explores why we love cinema, why we believe in “movie magic” and why we trust authority, doing so with originality and an ever-present smile.
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