YouTube Free Movies: Capricorn One

Capricorn One. One of those movies you hear a lot about, but never get around to watching until you see it on YouTube Free Movies and say, "What the heck?"

This film -- either from 1977 or 1978, depending on the source you go to, is borne of the distrust in government that the Watergate scandal brought on. Peter Hyams, who would later bring us less paranoid space fare in "2010," pitches this one sentence to ITV, and had a deal and $4.8 million to make the movie after only five minutes:

"There was one event of really enormous importance that had almost no witnesses. And the only verification we have ... came from a TV camera."

That one event, of course, is the Apollo moon landing. So in a very big way, this film helped fuel the "we didn't land on the moon" conspiracy theories that dog us even to this day. Of course, the only good thing that came out of that theory is this video, of conspiracist Bart Sibrel getting punched in the face repeatedly by Buzz Aldrin.

The film I found to be two things:

1. Rather entertaining

2. A good education on how a conspiracy to fake such an event would fall apart rather rapidly.

The film basically has three storylines, interwoven. There are the NASA conspiracists, shattered enough in finding out that the life support systems meant to keep the astronauts alive to, on, and from Mars won't cut it who then are under agency and political pressure to have a success, so much pressure that they decide to fake it all. There are the astronauts, brought into the conspiracy at the last minute -- rookie mistake to be sure -- and are forced to fly right or have their families threatened. There is the noob investigative reporter -- for a newspaper or television network, it's not clear -- who finds out and does invesgitatory work in rather stupid and straightforward ways.

I live-thought the movie today on my Facebook feed. Behold:

(We'll see if that Facebook embed works.)

Conclusion: I rather liked it. The story is shaky in spots, but it does go to show that to fake a story of this magnitude, either a lot of people have to be in on it and all keep their fat yaps shut, or you have to have a system of government so terrible and frightening that the populace is kept in line out of real fear. We didn't have either of those conditions in the post-Watergate years, and even now we don't have them, though you have to wonder why conspiracy theories still get bandied about.

So definitely one I would watch again.