![]() ![]() ![]() This high concept is brilliantly and convincingly staged by both the movie and the movie-within-a-movie. The makers of Capricorn One, a slightly daft but stellarly cast and highly enjoyable conspiracy thriller from 1978, have as their suspicious event a first human mission to Mars, but aside from that it taps right into the Moon-hoax theories of their time and ours. Having said all that, we all like a good twisty conspiracy in books and films, and the idea of something as huge and public as the Moon landing being faked is an attractive concept. Finally, if you watched Superman II and found the most outlandish thing in it to be the Earth astronauts on the Moon, you have other problems. Secondly, people played golf on the Moon and golfers make a big thing of always telling the truth with their shots and scorecards. By contrast, I’m expected to believe that thousands of miles away, conveniently out of my sight, is a place called “Australia”. For one thing, I’m looking out the window as I write this and the Moon is right there, a short hop away. Ergo, the whole thing was staged in the deserts of Nevada, directed by Stanley Kubrick. In 1969, so the argument goes, you still had to get up to change the channels on your TV, so how could we have the technology to put folk on the Moon? Also, how could a flag planted on the Moon make that shadow at that angle at that time of the lunar cycle, and so forth. The great white whale of ’60s-inspired ’70s conspiracy theories, of course, is that The Moon Landings Were A Hoax. Pakula’s triptych of Klute, The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. Hollywood, where cultural trends go to meet the marketplace, went big on conspiracy thrillers in the 1970s, most notably with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Alan J. Watergate vindicated the 1960s counter-cultural and anti-establishment feeling: a sort of justification that those who doubted the official ‘lone nutter’ explanation of the King and two Kennedy assassinations were indeed onto something. ![]() However, you could argue that in pop culture terms the Year Zero of conspiracy theories was sometime in the 1970s. It’s become something of a truism that the Internet age has enabled conspiracy theories to spread and propagate like a deadly airborne virus. On which point, it’s weird how anti-vaxxers distrust frontline healthcare workers and actual scientists but take as gospel some tweet by an anonymous guy living in his mom and dad’s basement in Arsebucket, Idaho, USA. On top of that, I also steered you towards Jack the Ripper’s real identity.Īside from that, though, I have no time for the more dangerous tinfoil-hatted eejitry such as your “Immigration is replacement!” and your “Jews control the world!”, but of course that could just be my double vaccine doses talking. ![]() Why haven't we heard "the truth" from moon hoax insiders? It's a fun movie to watch, despite some bad writing and dialogue.Conspiracy theorists among you will remember how I revealed who was behind Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election victory. Also, in Capricorn One, the astronauts were prepared to spill the beans to the world. On even a strictly need-to-know basis, at least hundreds would have to be on the inside, and many others participating in the mission, including the "lowly" technicians, would be able to figure out that something was amiss. Capricorn One illustrates one of these holes, in that a very few people were able to fool the entire world, including the Soviets, who would have screamed bloody murder to the world had they even suspected such a hoax. (Funny how only one "lowly" technician was able to figure it out!) There are too many holes in the various "moon hoax" theories (there are several different theories, having in common only that they all say NASA fabricated the Apollo missions) to mention here. The tech's close friend, a reporter, probes his friend's mysterious disappearance, meeting intrigue and danger along the way. One of the technicians suspects that something isn't quite right with his readings, and tells his bosses about it. So, to keep government funding, he decides to stage the mission on a studio set, and will go to all extremes, including murder, to protect the secret. Government space agency (a fictional NASA) learns that a planned mission to Mars cannot be accomplished. When I first heard of this movie in high school, about the time of its release (it would be years before I would actually see it), I was under the impression that it was sort of an expose, clothed in fiction, of the "moon hoax." Actually, while the makers of this flick were no doubt inspired by these weird theories, they didn't really subscribe to them, which I was gratified to learn. ![]()
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