Indeed, the basic premise of The Astronaut got a bigger-budgeted feature film in 1977 when writer-director Peter Hyams got the green light from Sir Lew Grade’s ITC corporation (best known for screwing the Beatles out of the copyrights to their own songs and bankrolling the original Muppet Show on TV) to produce Capricorn One. Hyams apparently got the idea from watching the Apollo 13 moon landing in 1969 and thinking, “There was one event of really enormous importance that had almost no witnesses. And the only verification we have … came from a TV camera.” In one respect Hyams’ script mirrored The Astronaut — both involved NASA (given a different name in The Astronaut but using its real name in Capricorn One) faking a Mars expedition and using the tricks of filmmaking to do it — but in The Astronaut the real astronaut was dead and the plot was to make him seem still alive, while in Capricorn One the astronauts are alive but the plot is to make them appear dead. The film begins with the U.S. about to launch Capricorn One, the first human-piloted mission to Mars, only just before the rocket carrying the spacecraft is about to lift off the head of the space program, Dr. James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) whisks the three astronauts — mission commander Charles Brubaker, Sr. (James Brolin), universally nicknamed “Bru”; Peter Willis (Sam Waterston); and John Walker (O. J. Simpson, cast at the insistence of the “suits” in Grade’s operation instead of Robert Hooks, the talented and experienced Black actor Hyams really wanted — and at least one imdb.com reviewer suspects that Simpson’s current disrepute is what has kept this movie from being better known and available on DVD or Blu-Ray) — out of the space capsule and onto the secret, ostensibly abandoned Jackson Air Force Base in Texas (it’s really in Mississippi, as several imdb.com “Goofs” posters noted, and the travel time to it is considerably quicker in the movie that an actual journey by car from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Texas would be), where they re-enact a Mars landing on an impromptu soundstage with a red backdrop and sandy red soil on the studio floor. Kelloway tells them that the reason for this is that the scientists in charge of the Mars voyage have discovered that, because the private contractor they hired to build the ship’s life-support system cut corners to pad their profits, the system is substandard and wouldn’t keep them alive for longer than three months. (This was four years after Simpson appeared in The Towering Inferno, another movie in which a contractor’s profit-driven cost-cutting led to a disaster.)
The plan is that the astronauts will re-emerge, ostensibly
rescued from the Capricorn One spacecraft when it supposedly drifted off course
and landed 200 miles away from where the ship was supposed to pick it up, only
when they bring the actually empty Capricorn One through the earth’s atmosphere
the heat shield falls off it, the spacecraft disintegrates and the astronauts
presumably die. (Hyams stages this in a scene obviously copped from Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey:
the medical indicators supposedly indicating the astronauts’ vital signs literally “flatline” and the machines thereby register their
deaths. In 1984, seven years after making this film, Hyams would direct a sequel
to 2001, 2010: The Year
We Make Contact.) The astronauts
themselves, realizing that NASA will have to kill them to make sure their plot
is not exposed, attempt to flee by stealing a general-aviation jet plane
conveniently parked at the base — but the plane has so little fuel in it they
have to crash-land in the desert and they rather stupidly decide to split up to
see who can get out of the desert and encounter civilization first. O. J.
Simpson’s character virtually disappears, Sam Waterston’s is tracked down and
killed by crews flying two mysterious dark unmarked helicopters — though in the
close-ups we see they’re olive-green, in the long shots they looked black and
made me think this might be the origin of all the conspiracy theories about the
U.N. supposedly flying “black helicopters” around for various nefarious
persons), but Brubaker survives encounters with a rattlesnake (which he kills
and cuts open for food and moisture) and a scorpion and finally interfaces with
crusading reporter — not another
crusading reporter — Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould, top-billed — so this film
features both Barbra Streisand’s ex-husband, Gould, and her current one,
Brolin), who’s about to be fired by his assignment editor (we’re told he works
for a TV outlet but we don’t see any movie or video cameras anywhere) because
he keeps coming up with loony-tunes ideas for “scoops” instead of covering the
bread-and-butter stories they want him to do.
Caulfield gets suspicious when
one of his sources at NASA, a man at Mission Control who noticed anomalies
between the readings he was getting on his computer and the ones that would
have been expected if the astronauts really were flying to Mars and back,
disappears, and in a scene Hyams pretty obviously cribbed from Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes, when Caulfield
visits his friend’s home, the person living there is a woman, the apartment is
completely different and she has documentation, including several months’ worth
of magazines she ostensibly subscribed to, to prove it. Then Caulfield
interviews Brubaker’s wife Kay (Brenda Vaccaro) and notices an anomaly in her
husband’s recorded communications with her: he said when he returned he was
going to take his family to Yosemite “like we did last year,” but the previous
year they didn’t go to Yosemite: they went to a deserted Western ghost town
where a movie crew was shooting a film and Bru took home movies of the film
crew at work. Caulfield goes out to the ghost town and finds himself shot at,
then federal agents come to his home and arrest him for possession of cocaine
(which they planted), and he’s bailed out by fellow reporter Judy Drinkwater
(Karen Black), whom he’s been after for years both professionally and sexually.
Caulfield traces Bru to the deserted Johnson Air Force Base and hires a local
crop-duster pilot, Albain (Telly Savalas in a schticky performance that makes his ridiculous work on the
old TV series Kojak seem
understated by comparison), to fly over and see if they can find Bru. They find
the two sinister olive-green helicopters sent by NASA to kill Bru and anyone
else who can expose the plot, and though they’ve more-or-less rescued Bru he
has to hang preposterously to the plane’s wing because the cockpit has room for
only two people. The helicopter pilots try to force down the plane by striking
its wings with their landing skids, but Albain fights back by releasing his
crop-dusting chemicals, causing the helicopter pilots to lose visibility and
conveniently crash into a nearby cliff.
The finale takes place at a memorial
service to the Capricorn One crew, to which Mrs. Brubaker has been invited, but
Caulfield shows up with the real and very much alive Brubaker and … we don’t
get the big confrontation scene we’ve been expecting all movie because instead
of bothering to write one, Hyams (who as I like to say about incompetent
writer-directors, is also the writer and therefore has no one to blame but
himself) has Caulfield and Brubaker approach the ceremony in mid-progress
(interrupting a speech by a typically otiose gasbag President of the United
States) and the crowd sees that
Brubaker is still alive. But we don’t get any audible reactions because Hyams
drowns his soundtrack in sappy “inspirational” music by Jerry Goldsmith and
stretches out the approach of the two men by filming it in slow motion. Like The
Astronaut, Capricorn One gives the impression of being a better idea for a movie than the one that actually got made, and
there are plenty of Hyams’ annoying directorial trademarks that marred the 2010 movie as well (though in fairness to him about 2010, no one
— probably not even Kubrick himself — could have made a viable sequel to 2001). The biggest problem with this movie is the abrupt
cuts from the investigative-reporter clichés with Elliott Gould to the survivalist
clichés with James Brolin —just when we’re finally interested by one of Hyams’ plot strands we’re
suddenly yanked away from it and thrown into the other — and it also doesn’t
help that Elliott Gould as an investigative reporter is as unbelievable a casting
decision as Elliott Gould as the worst-ever Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s
horrible desecration of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. There isn’t even a strongly etched female character
here like the one Susan Clark played in The Astronaut, and though this plot line would have presented its
own set of problems, Capricorn One
could have been more dramatically interesting if Caulfield and Mrs. Brubaker
had started to fall in love with each other, only to have to squelch those
feelings in a hurry once her husband turned out still to be alive.
Capricorn
One was clearly a product of the same
world-weary and conspiracy-minded post-Watergate Zeitgeist (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are even mentioned
in the dialogue) as such other, more interesting 1970’s movies as The
Parallax View, and Hyams seems to be
alluding to Jimmy Carter when he has the characters complain that the country
is getting nothing but bad news and the President isn’t giving them any reason
to hope. The idea that there is some “deep” truth kept carefully hidden from us
has become an accepted belief on both extremes of the political spectrum: the
Right posits a “deep state” comprised of government bureaucrats and the
academics they supposedly take their orders from out to keep the heroic,
brilliant President Trump from accomplishing his agenda to drive them out of
power and “make America great again,” while much of the Left’s writing about
Trump seems to posit the existence of a “deep ruling class” above the ruling
class we know about, one that extends worldwide and profits, literally and
figuratively, on a massive scale far greater than the capitalist establishment
we’re allowed to know about. And while Ronald Reagan saw the Right’s way to
political dominance as one in which they would take the optimistic high road
and proclaim “morning in America” after the “malaise” of the Carter years (a
word Carter himself never used, by the way), Donald Trump’s has been to
proclaim the “American carnage” that “only I can fix” and to make clear his utter
disinterest in doing anything to
help the Americans who didn’t vote for him. Capricorn One has an optimistic ending — “This time, at least, the good guys win” — but in some ways
it’s part of the trend away from the utopian science fiction of the 1950’s to
the dystopian stuff like The Hunger Games and Divergent that
dominates today, in which the world is run by sinister secret conspiracies that
you might temporarily derail but can never ultimately defeat.
