Prologue:
In a comment on Nick Mollo's thread about his fanedit of "Capricorn One" I mentioned I was (and am) a huge fan of the original. In an email he asked me to write a review about his fanedit, which I hereby do. However, asking a fan of the original movie to write a review about a fanedited version (and in this case drastically fanedited) is quite courageous, because the review will probably be not a positive one. I have a huge respect for that. I for one always get afraid, when someone promises a review of one of my fanedits, who is a fan of the original movie. Unfortunately in this case my review also isn't all positive. Please bear with me that I love the original movie as it is, for its Hollywood style, for its mood and its pacing. I am fan since I was 13 or 14, when I watched it first in 1982 or 1983 and still am.
I tend to review a fanedit on its own, as if it was the original movie. Therefore I will not go too much into detail mentioning the original movie.
The review:
The title Eleven is based on the Apollo 11 mission, which might or may not be a fake. It's a great title choice. Capricorn One clearly is a fake. The fanedit starts off promising, generating a good atmosphere of suspicion, of suspense. I knew pretty early something was wrong about this attempt of a Mars landing. This worked really well as exactly what the faneditor wanted. But pretty soon things started to seem rushed and this feeling constantly remained for throughout watching the movie. The convincing of the astronauts to be part of the fake landing seemed unlikely to me, because of what was they said beforehand. The realization of the astronauts that they are about to get killed is just popping up for no reason, so they escape. And with the exception of James Brolyn none of the other astronauts get any kind of proper introduction, which makes them extremely flat as characters.
The flatness of the characters is a continuing problem of the entire fanedit. Elliot Gould, the journalist, was actually the leading actor of the movie, but in the fanedit he is an ignorable side character, who actually does not have any influence on the story, which is especially awkward, when he enters the hangar, where they shot the fake landing scene. There is no scene showing how he was able to find that place. The faneditor tries to imply that by a scene, in which Brubaker's wife shows him videos of a movie production in Flatrock, which she and her husband and son visited last summer. To me this was way not enough to find a top secret facility. And the journalist finding the hangar is also his last scene int he movie, which does not seem to have any impact on anything. The funeral does not get interrupted and the conspiracy is not revealed. The journalist's character in the fanedit is actually the thing that explains best, why this fanedit did not work for me. It all seems to happen by chance and mere luck, which irritates me more than making things interesting or thrilling.
The astonaut's plot works kind of well. I found that shot, when the one astronaut had climbed up the cliff and there is that long zoom towards the cliff to see the choppers confusing, it felt wrong. In the commentary the faneditor explained his motivation why he used the scene backwards, but it does not work well for me this way.
The death of Brubaker is another problem, because I did not see it. Of course there is no footage for that, but a reall movie would show it by all means. The hero deserves a proper death (if he dies). The ending is overall problematic for me, because of the huge number of fade-outs that kind of rip it apart. Brubaker in the cave, Brubaker in the storm, Burnaker shot, funeral preparations and so on. In the end I was not happy with the movie and especially not with the ending, because it seemed chopped.
However, the expertise of the sound work the faneditor created on Brubaker's escape from the gas station for example is outstanding.
So, as a movie itself, the fanedit works, but was still disappointing for me because of plot holes (timing, jumps, the journalist, character depth), resulting in a 2 of 5 rating for entertainment.
Editing execution was pretty good: the faneditor took care to avoid hard cuts and made some terrific and well working scene to scene edits. There are too many fade outs in the end. This results in a 4 of 5 rating for editing.
The audio came as PCM and was edited extremely well. A lot of work went into this. Unfortunately the soundtrack for Capricorn one is rather boring and repeating the main theme that often gets a bit annoying at times. I rate the audio editing 4 of 5.
The image quality of the movie is sufficient, yet it suffers a bit from interlacing problems and a rather low bitrate. Using PCM audio only takes too much disc space, which shows on the image quality. My PAL original looks a lot better. Also 16 to 9 is standard these days and is also, what the original DVD is in. Turning it to 4 to 3 is an unnecessary degradation. Resulting in a 3 of 5 for image quality.
DVD Details: The fanedit comes with an interesting 23 minutes commentary, animated menus, cover art, an additional slideshow, animated scene selection. It is really a nice DVD. On the contra side it should be mentioned that using PCM audio only takes too much disc space, which shows on the image quality. 5 of 5 for the DVD authoring.
Conclusion:
The original movie is rather a detective story than a science fiction movie, rather a suspense thriller than an action movie. The faneditor tried a lot to work on the pacing, to make the movie faster and more menacing. Unfortunately this was done on cost of the depth. To me the fanedit is very superficial, where the original has a lot of depth to it on many levels. The problem is that I seem to like everything the faneditor hated about the original, so I am probably the worst choice of person to review his work here. I loved the cliff joke, I enjoyed the car without brakes scene, I really liked Telly Savallas and I am a fan of Elliot Gould...
Still I am sure people can and will enjoy this fanedit. It is not amateurishly done and I am looking very forward to the next works of Nick Mollo, who is among those rare faneditors, who risk a lot for a new view and not just little cuts here and there.
The overall rating from me is 3 of 5 (because of the entertainment rating, which is the most important one for me, I cannot give a higher rating, although the sum implies a 4 out of 5).
