On its own, this is a pretty batty scheme, but when Brolin expresses his unwillingness to go along with the plan, Holbrook tells them that all their families are flying home on the same jet, and if he doesn’t give the all clear, it will blow up. Then he takes them next door, where they learn the plan, to fake the transmissions from the flight, and on the ground on Mars, on a movie soundstage. Then he tells them that the life support system that had been built wouldn’t be able to keep them alive for the whole mission, because of the contractor cutting corners – capitalism, eh? – and they couldn’t take the risk of scrubbing the mission. He gives a big speech about how important the mission is, and how it can’t be seen to fail, otherwise the President will just cut the programme altogether. The three astronauts arrive at a secret facility, where they are briefed by Hal Holbrook, the big cheese at NASA. They’re played by James Brolin (father of Thanos), Sam Waterston, and, um, OJ Simpson. The astronauts are flown away from the launch. It’s a film about faking a mission to Mars, and they can’t even fake a rocket launch. It’s a sign of how cheap the film is, that the launch is only ever seen on monitors, obviously using stock footage. The rocket, now without any passengers, takes off as if nothing’s wrong. Just before launch, the astronauts are unexpectedly told to leave the capsule, and taken away from the launch site. The film opens with an unmistakable Jerry Goldsmith score, as a rocket launch of a manned mission to Mars is in its final stages. As somebody who believes that the moon landings were one of the greatest achievements of humanity, anything that labours under the premise that we’re not smart enough to do it isn’t going to be my favourite thing. So forgive me if I might not cut this film as much slack as I like to do with this blog. It was an angry opinion piece about how disgraceful the whole premise of the film was, and how it impugned the work of everybody who works on the space programme.Īs time has passed, I’m also tending towards the theory that a lot of people saw this film when they were quite young, and have misremembered it as a documentary, and that’s why we have moon landing deniers.

I fear my attitude to this film was irrevocably set by a column in Starlog magazine about it.

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