I'm once again 16 years old when I was quick to point out to adults all those contradictions they'd learned to ignore. No explanations are needed.At movies like this I tend to regress. Hyams does, he can have the good guys arbitrarily confounded by the bad for as long as it is convenient. Lovab'e and always reliable.The stuff that comes in between is humorless comic-strip stuff about a conspiracy so widespread that you finally realize that the only people in the country who don't know about it are the three astronauts, a minor space employee, one unreliable television reporter, an eccentric crop-duster, owner of the lovable biplane, and the members of their immediate families.Such complicity reduces the problems for the screenwriter so that, as Mr. Fields, and a final ?chase involving two wicked helicopters and a nice, old-fashioned biplane, the sort of machine that is to aircraft what Labrador retrievers are to dogs. 'Capricorn One' has two decent sequences-a runaway? interlude, which has been done much more funnily by people like Buster Keaton and W. Or so says Hal Holbrook, who plays the mission's director, as he tries to convince us-as well as the mission's three astronauts, who've been removed from their space capsule at the last minute-that the plot we're about to ? is not a piece of ?cheesecloth.Plots of movies like 'Capricorn One,' which was written and directed by Peter Hyams, don't have to be flameproof, and they don't even have to carry water, only a tiny bit of conviction and? more important, wit. Then, however, 'Capricorn One,' an expensive stylistically bankrupt suspense melodrama, gets down to its real narrative.This is the story of a United States Mars landing, faked by apparently several hundred thousand employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, because the mission's life-support system is faulty, but to scratch the mission would mean the end of the nation's space program. It's accurate in all those banalities we know and love.

On the soundtrack we hear the voice of a radio announcer give the solemn details of what was eaten at breakfast by the three astronauts who begin their journey to Mars this day.The sequence lasts perhaps 10 minutes, and it's very promising. Real or fake, it always looks the same-people intensely busy as they monitor complex computers, television screens flash incomprehensible data, and scientists drink coffee from paper cups. Cut to the Houston Mission Control Center-you've seen it dozens of times on television and in the movies. Cut to spectators watching from several miles away. Various shots of a huge missile on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

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