Capricorn One
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Capricorn One is a horror/thriller/science fiction movie about a Mars landing hoax. It was released in 1978 and directed by Peter Hyams.
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The plot
The setting is the present (the late 1970's actually) with one exception: the first manned mission to Mars is on the pad, ready to go. When NASA realizes that a major subcontractor's faulty life support system design has doomed any chance of a successful flight, rather than scrub the mission, they decide to fake the landing.
Just as the space ship is about to leave Earth, the bewildered crew are removed and flown to an old U.S. Army base somewhere in the United States, where they are informed that whether they like it or not, they will be cooperating in faking the TV footage. As the ship continues to Mars with no one aboard, the astronauts are forced to fake the trip and landing on Mars over a period of several months.
Despite almost no one in NASA knowing the truth, an alert technician notes something absurdly impossible - the television transmissions are arriving ahead of the spacecraft telemetry. "It's almost as if they were closer... but those signals couldn't be coming from three hundred miles." The too smart for his own good technician is "disappeared" but not before alerting a friend, a TV network journalist who becomes suspicious, and every clue he uncovers seems to result in an attempt on his life. When the astronauts are just about to "splash down" on Earth everything goes wrong. The empty but real space capsule burns up on re-entry, leaving the world mourning three dead heroes. If the live astronauts show up somewhere, the whole plot falls apart, so the remainder of the film is a life and death hunt as the astronauts attempt to escape and rogue NASA/military types pursue them to ensure that they stay dead heroes.
The movie significantly increased interest in Apollo moon landing hoax accusations.
Cast
- Elliott Gould as Robert Caulfield
- James Brolin as Commander Charles Brubaker
- Sam Waterston as Lieutenant Colonel Peter Willis
- O. J. Simpson as Commander John Walker
- Hal Holbrook as Dr. James Kelloway
- David Doyle as Walter Loughlin, Caulfield's editor