Things do go a bit off the rails in the final act, when Caulfield hires a wise-cracking cropduster (Telly Savalas) to help in his hunt Savalas' comic relief comes out of nowhere and fits in with nothing (and why does he call everyone he meets a "pervert"?).
#Capricorn one common sense media movie#
The trio end up lost in the desert with government killers on their trail, and Hyams makes the rest of his movie one long chase sequence, with the right blend of excitement and danger. His adventures keep things moving quite well, while Gould's knack for laid-back snark adds some much needed lightness to the proceedings.Īt the one hour mark, the film takes a new turn as the astronauts finally escape (having realized that they're likely to be offed when it comes time to tie up the cover-up's loose ends). Interspersed with this story is a parallel plot featuring sourpuss reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould), who slowly begins to uncover the conspiracy, stumbling into danger along the way as mysterious government agents attempt to silence him. The cast (even a pre-infamy Simpson, giving the finest performance of his big screen career) is uniformly excellent, and the characters are sharply defined in rewarding ways. And despite the epic approach to the scam (spanning nearly a year, to semi-accurately match the time it would take to get there and back), the story flies by at a steady clip, giving us just enough of a hint at the enormity of the strain on the captive astronauts without bogging us down as well. (Two more digs are made at this: during the faked Mars landing, the President's voice is heard only in the form of a prerecorded message that rambles with political shallowness later, a NASA-connected Congressman, wonderfully played by David Huddleston, rightly predicts an important phone call will come not from the top, but from the veep.) Holbrook, for all his character's villainy, delivers a beautiful, angry monologue about American indifference toward the space race, and how the joys of Armstrong's first steps all too quickly devolved into petty arguments over funding and priorities.Īfter Kelloway's speech, Hyams takes us into some dark territory, as we watch the astronauts reluctantly go along with the hoax - and we chill to the ease at which the whole thing's pulled off. "Capricorn One" toys with this, giving us an opening sequence in which the President is revealed to be too busy to attend the launch of the first rocket to another planet the weaselly Vice President (James Karen) is sent in his stead, and he spends all his time ogling the female form. Mere years after landing on the moon, the public was bored with space exploration itself. More importantly, however, is how the filmmaker addresses a different issue: by the mid-1970s, America hadn't just grown cynical, it had grown apathetic. The idea of NASA having a team of assassins on standby is quite a stretch, but Hyams keeps the threats vague enough to build the right sense of dread and paranoia without openly collapsing into ridiculousness. Oh, and if they don't, their families will be killed. So for the sake of the nation, Kelloway wants his astronauts to play along in faking the whole dang thing. By golly, a Mars landing will do the trick. But such a setback would only worsen national morale, already at a dismal low, and the American people need something proud and courageous to lift up their spirits. There, NASA bigwig James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) explains that they've had to scrub the mission due to faulty equipment. Simpson) are set to be the first men on Mars, until, minutes away from lift-off, they're scrambled out of the capsule and taken into hiding. While writer/director Hyams originally conceived the idea for the story years earlier, it wouldn't be until Watergate that his notions would really gel after all, with our leaders lying to us about everything else, why wouldn't they add the space race to the list?Īstronauts Brubaker (James Brolin), Willis (Sam Waterston), and Walker (O.J. The movie is a clever play on the beliefs of those moon landing conspiracy nutters - you know, the folks who, despite trivial things like "facts" and "evidence," swear the Apollo mission was all a big put-on.
Here's a film that wants not only to reflect the cynicism of its time, but also study it, openly wondering if the mood of the nation could truly be salvaged by heroic deeds, or would we only view those deeds with somber, questioning eyes, too? Remembered today mainly as a bitter, post-Watergate conspiracy thriller, Peter Hyam's "Capricorn One" embraces its genre while simultaneously digging a bit deeper.