"Capricorn One" is a clever but flawed paranoia-type thriller.
In the movie, NASA attempts to fake the first manned mission to Mars with the "cooperation" of the three astronauts. The astronauts discover they are to be killed as part of the hoax. (The space hardware is all Apollo stuff, which is obviously implying that the Apollo moon landings were faked, as conspiracy theorists have alleged ever since.) There are some good performance here, by Hal Holbrook as the desperate NASA administrator, Sam Waterston as an astronaut with a desperate sense of humor, and Telly Savalas as a wild but skilled airplane pilot.
If you can look past all the contrived scenes and plot holes, you'll be fascinated by Peter Hyams' conception of how such a space landing could be faked, and how the deception might be unraveled. It's only in the last part of the movie that I lost interest. The helicopter chase scene is fun, but you know how it's going to turn out so there was no real suspense there.
The basic concept behind the Mars landing hoax was the use of state-of-the-art (by 1970s standards) special effects to fool the whole world into accepting the "landing" as real. Today's SFX are so much more sophisticated that things that we really do take for granted as true might indeed be faked. All of which brings to mind Pontius Pilate's famous question: "What is truth?"
In the movie, NASA attempts to fake the first manned mission to Mars with the "cooperation" of the three astronauts. The astronauts discover they are to be killed as part of the hoax. (The space hardware is all Apollo stuff, which is obviously implying that the Apollo moon landings were faked, as conspiracy theorists have alleged ever since.) There are some good performance here, by Hal Holbrook as the desperate NASA administrator, Sam Waterston as an astronaut with a desperate sense of humor, and Telly Savalas as a wild but skilled airplane pilot.
If you can look past all the contrived scenes and plot holes, you'll be fascinated by Peter Hyams' conception of how such a space landing could be faked, and how the deception might be unraveled. It's only in the last part of the movie that I lost interest. The helicopter chase scene is fun, but you know how it's going to turn out so there was no real suspense there.
The basic concept behind the Mars landing hoax was the use of state-of-the-art (by 1970s standards) special effects to fool the whole world into accepting the "landing" as real. Today's SFX are so much more sophisticated that things that we really do take for granted as true might indeed be faked. All of which brings to mind Pontius Pilate's famous question: "What is truth?"