19. Capricorn One
With this flick, Peter Hyams has written and directed one of the greatest and highly regarded conspiracy movies ever made and its a reflection on how great his script is, how brilliant his direction is and how flawlessly entertaining and engrossing the first two acts of the movie are that the rather naff, embarrassing and poorly aged climax does not detract from the film over-all. Hyams wrote the flick as a direct response to all those loony conspiracy theories about there never being a moon landing and it all being an elaborate hoax, latched around that alleged theory you can see a camera crew filming in the reflection of Neil Armstrongs head visor! Here, were dealing with NASAs first manned space flight to Mars where the three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston and OJ Simpson) involved are seconds away from blast-off when mysterious NASA aides enter the craft and force them to leave. It is explained that the spacecraft has a dangerous technical flaw that would have ended their lives so they cannot take off but, because of the programmes desperate need for funding, they need to make it look like they have to the viewing public and government figures. So, in a television studio out in the desert, the three astronauts are forced to make the broadcasts as if they were actually on the red planet. Then a technical fault on the orbiting ship rears its head whilst broadcasting live across America that, in reality, would have taken the astronauts lives so now they must die! As the three men escape the studio and make their way across the desert, chased and hunted by black ops helicopters looming in the distance, Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) a local journalist, becomes suspicious when a friend of his who is a NASA technician within the Mars programme starts raising doubts and disappears soon after. He starts an investigation that Well, I got carried away with just an outright plot description there didnt I? But it does lead us very comfortably into that climax that is just so ridiculously at odds with the rest of the film that it almost, very nearly, derails the entire film:
*Big Spoilers Hereonin* Telly Savalas turns up as Albain the Cropduster and takes on the black ops helicopters with Goulds Caulfield as his co-pilot and James Brolins exhausted astronaut strapped to the wing yes you read that right! Then theres that horrible, horrible, horrible slow motion run through the cemetery as Brolin goes to stop his own funeral and Hal Holbrooks evil NASA figurehead twists his face in furious slow-motion too. Oh, its so bad! So very, very bad! Which is a crying shame because the rest of the film is out-and-out brilliant that it more then deserves a position on this list!