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Capricorn OneWhen NASA's first manned mission to Mars runs up against safety problems, a far-fetched contingency plan is implemented. The mission will go ahead - after a fashion. The astronauts (Brolin, Waterston and Simpson) are locked in a remote film studio where the Mars landing will be acted out for TV, in the process saving NASA and the US Presidency from embarrassment and delivering to the world a clear statement of America's supremacy in space.
Journalist Robert Caulfield (Gould) smells a rat and soon the mock trip to Mars is facing complications that no amount of subterfuge can conceal. With impassioned mission controller Dr James Kelloway (Holbrook) forced into deeper deception, the crew must find a way to expose the fraud themselves. Their dilemma: officially they're about to die. If they speak out, they'll be dead for real.
Released in 1978 when the air was still heavy with post-Vietnam disillusion and post-Watergate cynicism, writer-director Hyams weighs America's suspicion of its own space programme against the propaganda potential of the project's frontier-forging spirit and finds the establishment's ethics severely wanting.
It's a fantastic premise, but Hyams might as well be using a spoon to cut rope so implausible does the plot become, so ham-fisted is the dialogue and so heavy-handed is the irony. (The crew are to be welcomed back to Earth with a victory banquet "topped by a 40 foot red cake depicting the Martian surface".) Even Gould and Holbrook look mildly surprised at some of the lines they're given, and the less said about space cowboys Brolin, Waterston and Simpson the better.
A lively Telly Savalas zooms in late in the day with a knackered old bi-plane that's mysteriously capable of outrunning the US air force, but it's the crash-landing of a conclusion that really frustrates, Hyams not so much clearing things up as ambling idly away from the wreckage. A staple on late night cable, the paranoid premise that propels Capricorn One ensures that with each new viewing you hope it's going to get better. It never does.
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