Eileen and I watched the 1978 movie Capricorn One last night. I haven’t seen this movie in many, many years while Eileen had never seen it. I don’t even recall how we got on the topic of this movie many months ago but Eileen was intrigued with the plot, so we finally watched it.

It was pretty much the same as I recalled although I was probably more critical of the direction and writing this time around. Exactly as I remembered, the acting was pretty lame. And just like I recalled, there were really huge holes in the “science” of the script. Could you really believe NASA would use the old Apollo gear to land on Mars? That old lander would crumple like tin foil under the Martian gravity. Who could really believe astronauts would spend months at a time cramped up in that small Apollo capsule?

Its still a fantastic concept, well scripted, and everything else works well enough to pull off a decent movie. Eileen enjoyed it too, she pointed out how well scripted it was. The pace moved along at the right speed and there was nothing unnecessary to the plot line.

Eileen was the first to notice one of the actors was Sam Waterson, we know him better for his role in Law and Order and while he didn’t have a lot of screen time here he didn’t embarrass himself. Ditto for OJ Simpson, who would later go on to embarrass himself in other ways. Other actors we recognized by face, even if not by name, included Elliot Gould and James Brolin. Both gave excellent performances.

We were also reminded of similarites with many Hitchcock films. The most significant feature for me was how most violence was kept off-screen. People were killed, you knew they were killed yet it wasn’t necessary to show it. In fact the characters never really said that anyone was killed, you just knew it happened and the story moved along.

Many movies made today suffer the flaw of assuming audiences are stupid. Modern sound tracks are amplified to provide hammer-like cues telling us when to be sad, when to be scared, and when to be tense. Most of these movies are so full of special effects that you never really get to see really talented actors practicing their craft – if there are any really talented, rather than just popular, actors casted at all. Every detail of the storyline has to be played out as if it was being spoon-fed to an infant. It was refreshing to see one of these older movies that didn’t suffer these flaws at all.

We borrowed this film from our local library so it didn’t cost us anything but still gave us an evening of enjoyment. If you’ve never seen this movie then you should try to catch it someday.