Capricorn One

Watched this when it come out and now can watch it as many times as I want to, great film makes you wonder we're they got the idea from, NASA and moon trips

This is a fabulous film. Exciting action and some superb dialogue. Tom Bosley steals the show as elliot goulds sarcastic editor. And hal Holbrook is good playing his usual shifty characters.

Capricorn One is a really classic film. It is so simple.It is like a really simple formula, really, really simple that has been so finely honed to perfection in simple story telling, as a gripping thriller with exiciting scenes and in terms of greatly effecting cinematography. The acting is so well carried off, fitting in perfectly with the so finely honed, most simple formula idea. Within that, each actor shines so well at least in the very effective constraints of the formula. Here is one of the best classics of storyboard, script and editing together. That this happens fortunately to combine with classic acting, action and human importance of the theme makes for one of the greatest moments in cinema.While some actors are given writing which enables them to amazingly excel, making some of the finest performances on film - Hal Holbrook, Karen Black and Elliot Gould particularly. The other starring roles are very well to excellently played, whether in desert outdoors or studio, and even small parts are at least finely achieved, Robert Walden - to really great, Elliot Gould's character's female journalist companion. Such is the quality that even cameos are so well done, such as when Gould's character tries to find his friend played by Walden and comes across an unknown lady in an appartment he is looking around.Telly Savalas provides some welcome relief in a less serious role, just as the plot and script veer off more into the kind of pulpish, science fiction ending. Yet the seriousness remains at the same time - it's a good idea for the topic where it is even relevant to show the theme in such a way as it is about certain elements of life being so divorced from the kind of everyday normality that most people would recognise. I'm certainly not criticising the ending, it's what the film does. And to me it seems much better than if it were to be getting bogged down in trying to make the film which is something so simple and starkly immensely meaningful into something that tries to be more believable in conclusion.It's a really serious subject - the film knows that - and maintains it through excellent, gripping entertainment all the way to the end.When I say it's a really serious subject I'm not actually saying I concur with the conspiracy theories that there was never any real moon expedition, landing, other space trips and so on. It just happens that this is a particular story - in the prevalent time of excellent, very relevant conspiracy theory cinema (3 Days of the Condor, Outland, Chinatown, The China Syndrome etc.) which so well uses a subject to present the government, illuminati conspiracy theme. It does it excellently.At a time when some of the most fundamental parts of old conspiracy theory movies can even be found to have come true or have been true all along (eg. 3 Days of the Condor and the USA in Asia in the first decade of this century, particularly Iraq), the illuminati conspiracy film can be one of the most relevant and important styles of artistic expression today.*** SPOILER PARAGRAPH *** - Hal Holbrook's terrifying speech after terrifying speech of lies is just the most exemplary example of this in cinema and can only be in the top ten achievements of cinema ever. It brings this move into one of the finest acheivements in modern cinema.---Blu-ray quality: Yes, it's very good. Some people might expect better for full HD, but its' very good quality and much better than I've ever seen the film in before (I've seen it numerous times as I was growing up before the days of flat screen and digital TV). Very satisfying and there is no sense of the (very nice) visual experience detracting from the visual story, which I feel could have been the case in a different render, and can be the case in some HD films. Yes - I think if you feel the quality here is disappointing, you don't really relate to the life of the film well.Some people are saying their disc is in 4:3, which I didn't find - I watched in widescreen. It's one of the narrower panavision widescreen formats which are to be found in mainstream cinema, and great to watch in that. I know that when this film was screened on TV in the 1980s, for example, it was in 4:3 and it's very difficult to see how they made a tall 4:3 after you've seen this narrow widescreen original version.Certainly, it's a disc to have. Mine was rented, but I want to buy a copy as soon as I can.

Excellent splendid lovely smashing great.

This is maybe hyams' best film. He's always been a good director, and you can tell by this title how working in the Seventies was beneficial to many people in the cinema industry. Hyams would never be so in shape as in capricorn one, helped by a good script and an excellent idea that doesn't just hint at monnlanding conspiracy theory, but also reflect the sense of disbelief toward institutions of that era. It's a very well directed film, both in the action and in the dialogue scenes. i love the way the photography, the acting, the camera, the editing and the sound contribute in giving you the exact atmosphere of a scene and a situation, without overdoing: usually it's a long shot, filled with silence and pauses, slow camera movement, always keeping the character and thr setting in the middle of the scene. Often sottracting detailes instead of piling them up in a exagerated concentration of infos like they started doing in the cinema from the following decades (the eighthies) and even more later on. Now it's unconceivable not to cut every 2 seconds, resulting in a total loss of sense and comcentration of the viewer, who is constantly defocused from what's going on. Still, the action sequences are adrenalinic and very well crafted, so the movie is very well balanced: fast when it must, slow and suspended when it needs to let you live with the characters and their dilemma. Just one flaw: the ending. It's obiously a producer's cut, because it's not comsistent with the rest of the movie, and you can tell it by the awful slow motion: when it's not fluid but jittering like in that sequence, it means that the director didn't shoot it to slow it down in post production (and it makes sense, because that clip doesn't belong to the kind of mood you felt throughtout the story). So, when I saw it, I could hear the producer saying: " well, won't you end the movie so low key, silently and without emphasis?! Stress it up, give it some good effect, make it look amd sound glorious: the audience must understand everything ended up fine". That scene was probably the beginning of the end of an era.

I remember watching this on telly when I was little and its taken me years to find the dvd What can i say .......An all star cast including Telly Savalas Elliot Gould Hal Holbrook and James Brolin Its a fantastic gripping story of betrayal and government cover up Well worth buying if you are a fan of the genre 5 stars