Capricorn One

A film of its time and simultaneously a film for our day and age. The paranoia of the 1970s is deeply embedded in Peter Hyams’ thriller. The trust in everything the United States stands for is gone, but at the same time, there is an overwhelming longing to be able to believe in something. A longing to be filled by NASA’s manned mission to Mars - a mission that never takes place. The images of the landing on the red planet are faked on an abandoned military base. As this lie is about to become public, the people in charge try to do everything to keep the truth from coming out. Not only journalist Robert Caulfield, played by Elliot Gould, gets into the crosshairs of government sanctioned killers: the three astronauts who did not actually travel to Mars also have to be eliminated. During all of the chases and action sequences that Peter Hyams stages with truly unique nonchalance, the people chasing Caulfield and the astronauts remain invisible. The threat has no face. It is part of an apparatus that seems unstoppable.