Capricorn One: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack + Original Motion Picture (1978/Perseverance CD + Lionsgate DVD)/It’s A Disaster (2013/Oscilloscope DVD)/Philadelphia Experiment (2012 TV Movie Remake/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)/Ring Of Fire (2012 TV Mini-Series/Gaiam Vivendi DVD)

 

Picture: X/C+/C+/B-/C     Sound: B/C+/C+/B-/C+     Extras: C/B/C+/D/C-     Main Programs: B/C+/C/C-/C-

 

 

Now for some thrillers with some comedy, intended and unintended, plus one that is a comedy outright…

 

 

After working as a TV news cameraman, then moving onto TV movies and theatrical films, Peter Hyams had a breakthrough box office hit with Capricorn One in 1977, a thriller about the NASA Space Program in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston and unfortunately, O.J. Simpson) manning a flight to Mars, but they find out at the last minute that the capsule cannot make it and agree to take part in a hoax.  They go to a set that looks like a movie set-up and pretend to land on Mars. Later, when their capsule explodes (intentionally or not) upon return, they are still alive so NASA and the feds have to hide them… or kill them!

 

Though the film is available overseas on Blu-ray, it is only in the U.S. still on DVD, but a solid Compact Disc of Jerry Goldsmith’s music score has been issued by Perseverance Records has been issued and it is terrific.  The film was a big production for the time, released by Warner Bros. a year after Fox released the first Star Wars as a substitute for Superman – The Movie being delayed and it was a hit too.

 

A product of the Nixon years, Jimmy Carter was President by the time both films were hits and Capricorn One was actually a production of Lord Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment, a TV production company that also made feature films and Grade always wanted a big hit with an American/Hollywood lead.  This was the closest that dream was ever realized.

 

The film is a mix of healthy cynicism, still-effective action and some mature comedy, but what is interesting about the Goldsmith score is that it has the grand sense of patriotic American can-do music and attitude, but cleverly toned with cues and instruments that underscore a new slightly cynical America and a then-mature America before bad, regressive 1980s cinema helped to ruin and sabotage it all.  He never made another score like it and there is not a score out there quite like it.

 

This Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD is solid and includes a booklet that includes a fine essay by film music scholar Jeff Bond.  As for the Original Motion Picture (will someone try to remake this one and ruin all it’s points), the DVD version from Lionsgate is older and watchable, but the U.S. market deserves a Blu-ray.  The film is not only inspired by the Nixon Years, but by the myth that the U.S. Moon Landing was faked, so this is a film with a dark side inter-textually and within its storyline.  The leads are good (though Simpson seems bored) and this was such a big production, that it has a seriously major supporting cast including Elliott Gould, Hal Holbrook, Brenda Vacarro, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, David Doyle, Sam Huddleston, James B. Sikking, Denise Nicholas, Robert Walden, Alan Fudge and Nancy Malone.

 

This was an A-level production and it has aged in weird ways.  Some of the comedy has dated, along with some of the choices for action.  The then state-of-the-art rocket ship was about to be supplanted by the controversial NASA Space Shuttle and it was to launch two years later to coincide with another huge space-based movie hit. Lewis Gilbert’s huge James Bond blockbuster Moonraker (1979), but the shuttle would be a few years late and a few explosions in the decades that followed showed us why.

 

On the other hand, the cast is terrific and the film is a time capsule of a great moment in mature adult action cinema that did not last as long as it should have.  Hyams made this work well enough and it was somewhat forgotten thanks to the Reagan Era and Space Shuttle before any O.J. Simpson madness kicked in.  I love how the film strongly equates achievement and truth with American Patriotism and that too would sadly fade, plus some moments are derivative of recent films including a few parts of Westworld (for which Brolin was co-lead and we get a shot of Gould on what looks like its set-up), Futureworld (the Gould/Black reporter relationship, both films produced by the great Paul N. Lazarus III, who also produced this film), Planet Of The Apes (astronauts trying to survive against an evil menace out to get them in the desert), The French Connection and Cinerama films in the car chase and a few other items that also age the film, but Capricorn One is the kind of consistent action film Hollywood seems incapable of making like they used to, so it is worth seeing again or for the first time if you ever missed it.

 

Extras include another solid audio feature length audio commentary track by Director Hyams, the Original Theatrical Trailer and Making Of featurette Flights Of Fancy.

 

 

Since then as motion pictures have become dumbed down and generic, such well-made films have been supplanted by many bad things, including natural disaster films, though with the way corporations have been abusing the environment, how natural that is asks some serious questions.  Here are three recent releases that show how awful that new cycle has become.

 

 

The rise of digital visual effects on laughable releases like Twister (1996 already) made the revival of the 1970s Disaster Cycle create a new cycle, one that has been dead, but releases keep getting made in it.  Todd Berger’s It’s A Disaster (2013) has a group of friends (including the five male members of the on-line Vacationers comedy troop) who are in various dysfunctional relationships having their issues and lies spill out as it turns out a terror attack of some kind that seems to involve a deadly chemical gas has been unleashed, so they are stuck with each other more so than they should be.  Thus, it is also a stuck-in-a movie, but not a great one.

 

The jokes hardly ever work, the actors are likable (Julia Stiles is the best-known of the cast) and much of what they say sound and plays like people reading bad, predictable script dialogue.  I would add that there is also too much mumblecore sensibility for it to work and when you really think about it, we have hardly any evidence an attack has happened, that some of it could be a joke and faked, but I cannot get into that too much without giving away the storyline.  However, it is all distraction, but at least it is not cynical to the point of stupidity.

 

Extras include a Comic Con 2012 Panel Discussion during its release, Tour With Todd behind the scenes look at the making of the film, a feature length audio commentary track with Berger, David Cross, Kevin M. Brennan & Jeff Grace and three Vacationers comedy shorts.

 

 

On the other hand, when this is done seriously and with bad digital visual effects, it becomes cynical and dumb.  Paul Ziller’s highly unnecessary remake of The Philadelphia Experiment (2012) is amazingly bad, trying to recapture anything about the 184 original, which actually had a sequel in 1993 that was not memorable, but more ambitious in comparison to this dreck made in Canada.  Michael Pare from the original film even shows up, but in a new role, which is also a bad sign.

 

An experiment in 1943 during WWII to make items invisible is revived and what might have been an innocent attempt to create a secret innovation leads to disaster, literally in this case as ships land up ion top of buildings and fall, killing people and boring the viewing audience.  Nicholas Lea (X-Files) and Malcolm McDowell even show up and cannot make this work, but if the makers had tried to do more than use digital effects with less imagination than the analog video effects on the original Electric Company, this could have been at least fun.  Instead, it is really awful, predictable and everything you have seen before.  Unless you are really, really curious, you will despise it.

 

There are no extras.

 

 

Last (and because it is longer at three hours!!!) least, Paul Shapiro’s Ring Of Fire (2012) has Michael Vartan and Terry O’Quinn among a cast of more unknowns in a goofy disaster entry about mankind being bored… I mean threatened by the deadly dangers of a giant range of underwater volcanoes located under the ocean to kill us all.  Well, it is formulaic, dull, phony, silly, unfunny, uniformly bad and has been issued under the name the “Doomsday Series” meaning it is cynical in the most unhealthy way and it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on…

 

You get the idea.  Again, with some of the actors here, this might have worked and a few moments are so bad, they are amusing, but it is a wreck of a TV mini-=series and the kind that killed the format.

 

A Sneak Peak of the equally inept looking Eve Of Destruction (not to be confused with the killer female robot movie of the same name) is the only extra.

 

 

 

The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Philadelphia is no match of how good the original films looked, dark, lacking convincing color and having some detail issues, yet it is the best-looking of the four video releases on the list by default, if not the best-looking shoot.  The anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Capricorn and Disaster are better shoots and soft, though Disaster was a little softer throughout making it the poorest performer by a hair.  Capricorn was shot on real 35mm film with real anamorphic Panavision lenses, making it the best-looking film here, including work by Director of Photography Bill Butler, A.S.C., whose credits include Jaws and Grease.  It was shot to be on a big screen, has many fine shots and was issued in 70mm blow-up prints.  This DVD is older and a Blu-ray is long overdue.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 on Fire is also soft and is somewhere between Capricorn and Disaster, but also has some lame shots.

 

The PCM 2.0 Stereo on the Capricorn One CD is the best-sounding disc on this list with a pretty good, clean and clear approximation of how well recorded and produced the Goldsmith score was and is.  Goldsmith, one of the greatest film music composers of all time, was on a roll at this point and this CD is a must-hear for all serious movie music fans.  Unfortunately, the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on the DVD version is distorted, a little warped at times and tinny (the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track is worse) and does not represent the music or film sound well, which is all the more reason we need a Blu-ray version.  The 70mm blow-up prints had 6-track magnetic stereo sound in the older Todd-AO arrangement which had five speakers behind the screen (it and Moonraker would be two of the last such films before Dolby 70mm took over) so we have faint traveling dialogue and sound effects.  In real life, it should all sound better and the CD’s superior sound backs that up.

 

The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 on Philadelphia is the best sound by default on any of the video releases here, but its soundfield is limited, too much towards the front channels and not very imaginative.  The original film was monophonic and its sequel in Dolby’s advanced Spectral Recording (SR) system.  Both had more character in their mixing and recording.

 

The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on the DVDs of Disaster (too dialogue-based) and Fire are passable, but no better than the problematic same on Capricorn and make for uninspired mixes.

 

 

 

You can order the Capricorn One CD directly from Perseverance Records at this link:

 

http://www.PerseveranceRecords.com

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo