Capricorn One

Annotation for KRRR! 2010 by Fimový přehled

In the 1970s, NASA sends the first manned mission to Mars. Everything goes according to plan, and the spacecraft Capricorn 1 takes off on its long journey in front of the audience. Only a select few know that due to a technical failure, the astronauts would not survive the journey and were transported to a desert base just before launch. But a few people figure out the truth. What is the government willing to do to prevent any of this from leaking to the public? In 1977, director Peter Hyams made the film Capricorn 1 from his own script. Eight years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong took “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” a film was released that, albeit figuratively, dared to question the accomplishment of this feat. At that time, voices were heard in America claiming that Armstrong never got to the moon and that everything was just staged - in fact, similar opinions can still be heard, supported by evidence such as "how can an American flag fly on the moon when there is no atmosphere and therefore no wind". And then-beginning filmmaker Hyams, who had only three feature films and a few television films to his credit, expanded them into a two-hour conspiracy thriller. Two years earlier, the Americans had been forced to withdraw from Vietnam, after political affairs and due to the influence of the Cold War, the mood at that time was not exactly rosy and perhaps this was one of the reasons why the film, which also questioned the victory in space flight, did not receive much attention. Capricorn 1 was shown to audiences in Karlovy Vary in 1978 and was released in wider distribution in December 1979. Since then, it has been released on VHS and DVD, but only today, after more than thirty years, do we have the opportunity to see it on screen in its original format.