CAPRICORN ONE @ 45

As three astronauts prepare to take off on their way to Mars a secret service suit gets them out of the rocket and choofs them away to a secluded desert locale. The rocket takes off empty and the spacemen are told they will have to fake it in a movie studio. In a magnificently written speech the boffin behind the project explains that due to the voting public's indifference to the space program and the failure of a contracted life support system the mission would go ahead as a fake. Three highly trained team players with their lifes' dream ripped away. Not happy. The blackmail measures in place for their cooperation compel them but, as one journalist notices, one of them has relayed a coded message to his wife during a video call that exposes the scheme. The chase is on.

A good cast of up and comers, contemporary A-listers and character actors, sturdy score by the great Jerry Goldsmith and some fine writing and stunning action sequences make this one a winner. Odd, because this was only my second viewing and I was left with the impression that it barely edged ok. That notion of public disengagement in the scientist's speech is at the heart here, suggesting a people who need ever more extravagant stimulation to interest themselves can be manipulated as long as the show looks good. While it doesn't attempt the profundity of the similarly-themed Network from the previous year, the concern about a numbing of an America jaded from Vietnam and Watergate drives home. And that in what might have been left as a decent thriller.

Elliot Gould as the newshound on the case plays it like an updated Front Page. His sassy rapid-fire exchanges with Karen Black are like a Playboy generation Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The shouting matches between him and his editor take this further with knowing quotes from '40s classics (expertly funny performance from David Doyle in a meagre two scenes). In contrast, the more paranoid scenes with the young conscientious control room staffer and the issues-bound astronauts play more seriously.

That keeps things going for the central interest but director Peter Hyams, towards the start of a distinguished career in neo-noirs and political thrillers, throws in a white knuckle sequence of an unstoppable sabotaged car racing through city streets, a gruelling hillside  climb and an utterly thrilling air chase between two helicopters and a cropduster bi-plane. A lesser film would have been built around these scenes but here they take their place in a drama, emerging from the narrative line with a natural feel. Oh, those choppers, there are a few moments where they hover and turn toward each other like a pair of massive alien wasps conferring. It's unlikely but so effectively unnerving that you don't care.

The annoying Mendez (did I ever know his first name, everyone just called him Mendez) at high school said he thought that this was how the moon shots were done. The fact that his claimed belief in this was itself rubbery means that this film might both excite and disappoint him. I never found out nor cared to but recollecting it as I watched made me curious as to the age of the moon landing conspiracy bullshit. A quick wiki (so take that on board) led me to Bill Kaysing's succinctly titled We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle was published only the year before this film's release. To my mind that suggests this idle nonsense was under the ether from Apollo 11 on. That it inspired a pacy and compelling thriller that also took a breath to take stock of its own culture bears witness to the value of even the worst books. While I find the meme post-truth world irritating and defeatist, this fable of it reaches through decades to burn us a little more. Seldom is a sting so winsome.

Capricorn One is available through SBS on Demand.