Sci-Fi Movie Reflection: Capricorn One (1978) & When Things Get Too Big To Risk Failure

This one popped up in my YouTube feeds and I had to give it a go… As a lifelong fan of human space flight (AKA NASA nerd!), there is so much that is problematic about this movie right from the launch pad. But in as much as director, Peter Hyams, who would six-years-later helm the serviceable “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” chose to just hand-wave away any questions about how the hell the US was going to use an Apollo Saturn V moon rocket to get to Mars and just jumped right to the “problem” of a known faulty life-support system as the catalyst of this movie’s drama. Right from the start they signaled that they aren’t concerned with any of the specifics of how one might do such a space mission or even the difficulty of attempting such a huge conspiracy. This movie is about the director of a government agency who will do anything to keep the machinery of that agency going and use any means to do so. This “mission” is too important to risk failure or the appearance of failure, so this director, coldly played by Hal Holbrook, finds a work-around that will insure that the mission goes off without incident. And all it takes is for the three astronauts and a small group of technicians to tell a lie.

If all you get from this movie is fodder for “they faked the moon missions” conspiracies, then you’re missing the point. Anyone familiar with how complicated and difficult space flight is (even in 2025, just ask Elon…) knows that this movie does what movies do, in that they reduce an army of technicians to one sad fellow who detects that something is wrong with the TV signal and reduce a huge group of administrators who would have to be in on this plan to one administrator. But that’s not the point.

While the technicians and astronauts may have been drawn to the space program out of a sense of a higher calling to do amazing things for science. The whole “space race” was undertaken by the US government because we were getting our asses kicked by the Soviet Union and we needed a win. The “good” that came out of the program was the result of the men and women on the ground making the impossible possible, but it was always a calculated political decision on the part of whichever administration that was in power and congress. Little wonder that Nixon, who lost brutally to Kennedy in the ‘60s, enjoyed the accolades of being President when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon and then killed the program by demanding that it “pay for itself,” rather than see the benefits of long term investments in science and space technologies. And this movie is all about the cynical American public losing interest in human space flight, like they did after Apollo 11 and especially during the much later followup Space Shuttle program, and the inevitable problems that will happen when your space program is given out to the lowest bidders who will cut corners to increase profits. And when said problems arise, this one chief administrator decides that it is a better solution to create a shadow mission to fake the Mars mission instead of going to the president or congress to figure out a solution. Of course, everything goes south from there.

You can tell this movie is a product of the late 1970s because it depends on the drive of a bumbling fired journalist to uncover the conspiracy and bring it to light on live TV. This isn’t great cinema, but it’s an interesting look at the ever-present question about why we went to the moon and spent all those billions of dollars only to shut the whole thing down in 1972. When this movie hit theaters there was no visible Space Shuttle program and Skylab (America’s First Space Station effort) would end the next year. We weren’t in a good place and this movie reflects that “opportunities squandered” sentiment. JBB