Possible Spoilers<br /><br />`Capricorn One' is largely based upon the conspiracy theories of those who believe that the Apollo moon landings never took place, but is set against the background of a fictitious manned mission to Mars. Shortly before take-off, the astronauts are ordered to leave their craft by Dr Kelloway, NASA's director of the programme. He explains to them that the mission cannot proceed because of a faulty life support system. He is, however, unwilling to announce the cancellation of the mission because this might jeopardise continued Congressional funding for the manned space-flight programme. Instead, he and his supporters in the US government have decided to fake a mission. The astronauts role will be to remain in hiding for several months and to provide film of supposed explorations of the Martian surface, after which they will return as supposed `heroes' without ever actually having left the Earth's surface.<br /><br />The astronauts are initially unwilling to go along with this plan, but are persuaded to comply by the threat that their families will be murdered if they do not. Things start to go wrong, however, when, on the return journey, their spacecraft burns up while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. The astronauts realise that Kelloway and his associates intend to murder them in order to maintain the illusion that they died in a space accident, and manage to escape from the NASA complex in the Texan desert where they are being held.<br /><br />Apart from Kelloway himself, most of the NASA scientists are not in on the plot, but only one of them suspects that anything underhand is taking place. This man mysteriously disappears, but not before he has confided his doubts to his friend Robert Caulfield, a journalist. Caulfield realises what is going on and heads into the desert in an attempt to trace the three astronauts before Kelloway's security forces can track them down and kill them. The film ends with a frantic chase sequence, inspired by both the James Bond films and by Alfred Hitchcock. (In homage to `North by North West', a crop-dusting plane plays a role).<br /><br />Although the film has a space-travel theme, it is not really a science-fiction movie, but rather a political thriller of the sort that became popular in post-Watergate America. No attempt was made to give the film a futuristic look- the clothes, hairstyles, buildings and cars are all those of the late seventies. Even the design of the Capricorn spacecraft itself was based on the Apollo craft, and the shots of the rocket taking off are supposedly archive footage of an actual NASA moonshot. This was presumably done partly to save costs but also partly to make the film's message more immediate. `The Government is lying to you- now!' is a much more compelling message than `A future Government might lie to you in fifty years time'. From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, however, the film looks dated. What it seems to be saying is `If a manned flight to Mars had been a practical possibility twenty-five years ago- which of course it wasn't- the government of that day might have lied to you about it. '<br /><br />The film, however, suffers from inherent flaws which are more serious than its dated look. A political thriller may be fictional, but it must be plausible. `Capricorn One' is not. Its plot has more holes than a string vest. What is never made entirely clear is whether Kelloway planned from the beginning to murder the astronauts so they could never expose his deception, or whether he originally intended to let them live but changed his plan when the spacecraft burnt up on re-entry. Either way, however, the plot is unsatisfactory. We are asked to believe that a spacecraft designed to be flown by an on-board pilot could fly all they way from the Earth to Mars, land on Mars, take off and fly nearly all the way back to Earth. Presumably the craft would have to be remote-controlled from Earth, but we are also asked to believe that the entire corpus of scientists and technicians involved in the project, with one sole exception, would fail to notice that the craft with which they were in constant contact did not actually have anyone on board. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that the one scientist who did suspect something was wrong might be murdered to silence him, but it does strain credibility to suppose that the Government could not only have him killed but also arrange for him to disappear so completely that his family, his colleagues and all but one of his acquaintances failed to notice his disappearance. We are then asked to accept that the one acquaintance who does notice also has powers of deduction that make Sherlock Holmes look like a rank amateur and is able to work out precisely what has happened to the missing astronauts from the most tenuous of clues (such as the puzzled look of one of the astronauts' wives when her husband mentions where they spent their last family holiday). The villains seem to be able to call on an endless supply of guards prepared to obey their orders unquestioningly- none of those guards seem to have wondered how the astronauts survived the destruction of their craft or why they are now being called upon to kill men regarded as national heroes.<br /><br />The film may have had the intention of making people more suspicious of their government, but occurred to me that, paradoxically, it would be more likely to have precisely the opposite effect. Rather than making me think that the Apollo missions might themselves have been faked, it- no doubt inadvertently- strengthened my belief in the reality of those missions by showing just how difficult it would be to create a fake space mission and get away with the deception. 4/10.