The premise for "Capricorn One" is NASA fakes a mission to Mars through the use of a sound stage to film it like a movie to present via Houston Mission Control as fact. There's no sci-fi to that as it's really a murder/mystery with a rocket ship and I thought the idea was kind of flat so I never watched it.
Right off the top I've got my own Mission Control situation as I see O.J. Simpson's face in a close-up as one of the astronauts so right away there's a question of aborting the mission. He didn't say anything so I rolled with it and the movie ran for maybe forty minutes before he ever said anything.
In many ways the movie was not a disappointment so long as you accept the ludicrous premise NASA would really do this and have any chance of successfully getting away with it. The flow of it more or less made sense and some really big stars made interesting work of it.
But ...
There was such a blindingly obvious pooch screw so early in the movie that it was dead in the starting gate for me. In the first video of the astronauts on the surface of Mars, the camera is turned to look at Brubaker, the mission lead. There's a glare from the Sun in the face shield of his helmet and the size of it is obviously much too big for them to really be on Mars. Anyone who has watched thirty-eight seconds of a network astronomy show with the TV Kings of Physics would likely know that.
Maybe it's a nitpick but still I think it was a really dumb detail to miss when they were attentive to many others. They used a switch to slow-motion for the video of jumping from the landing craft's ladder to the ground and it was clever how they showed them working that aspect of it from the studio (i.e. one astronaut has to stop moving while the video goes to slow-motion for the other or the trick would be revealed).
The mistake bugs me because a Mars launch would have more photographers observing than a Girls Gone Wild world tour. The mistake with the Sun in the face shield would have been spotted for sure. It's not so much the issue of a pooch screw as one so esoteric it's not reasonable for it to be detected doesn't matter much but this one seemed impossible for any photographer to miss.
So this one gets the Award for Glossiest Western Dressed-Up to Look Like a Sci-Fi Movie because most of the time the astronauts are struggling about in the American West.
There's also the Award for Most Sexually-Disappointing Imitation Sci-Fi Movie and this is because there's a lot of talking of jumping Karen Black ... but it never happens.
Right off the top I've got my own Mission Control situation as I see O.J. Simpson's face in a close-up as one of the astronauts so right away there's a question of aborting the mission. He didn't say anything so I rolled with it and the movie ran for maybe forty minutes before he ever said anything.
In many ways the movie was not a disappointment so long as you accept the ludicrous premise NASA would really do this and have any chance of successfully getting away with it. The flow of it more or less made sense and some really big stars made interesting work of it.
But ...
There was such a blindingly obvious pooch screw so early in the movie that it was dead in the starting gate for me. In the first video of the astronauts on the surface of Mars, the camera is turned to look at Brubaker, the mission lead. There's a glare from the Sun in the face shield of his helmet and the size of it is obviously much too big for them to really be on Mars. Anyone who has watched thirty-eight seconds of a network astronomy show with the TV Kings of Physics would likely know that.
Maybe it's a nitpick but still I think it was a really dumb detail to miss when they were attentive to many others. They used a switch to slow-motion for the video of jumping from the landing craft's ladder to the ground and it was clever how they showed them working that aspect of it from the studio (i.e. one astronaut has to stop moving while the video goes to slow-motion for the other or the trick would be revealed).
The mistake bugs me because a Mars launch would have more photographers observing than a Girls Gone Wild world tour. The mistake with the Sun in the face shield would have been spotted for sure. It's not so much the issue of a pooch screw as one so esoteric it's not reasonable for it to be detected doesn't matter much but this one seemed impossible for any photographer to miss.
So this one gets the Award for Glossiest Western Dressed-Up to Look Like a Sci-Fi Movie because most of the time the astronauts are struggling about in the American West.
There's also the Award for Most Sexually-Disappointing Imitation Sci-Fi Movie and this is because there's a lot of talking of jumping Karen Black ... but it never happens.
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