Billionaire energy magnate Richard Carson III claims that the moon landings were faked. He also claims that NASA rejected his father and vows to be the real first man on the moon. In truth, he's trying to mine Helium-3 on the moon which could be the next great power source and super weapon. The American President decides to dust off an old museum 40 year old Saturn rocket. Mike Goldwing is a wind boarding kid with his friends Amy and techie Marty who has Igor the lizard. His father is picked to be the astronaut for the moon mission. His former astronaut grandfather Frank reluctantly joins all the old crews who are the only experts left in the old rocket. Frank has gone into retirement isolation and estranged from his family ever since he was left off the last moon launch. Mike works to close the family rift and end the family curse by sneaking onto the NASA launch. Only Carson had sent a saboteur.This is a Spanish animated movie. The animation is good but not at the best Hollywood levels. It's better than TV but not the best of theatrical fare. The story has some positives. The characters are good and I like the kids. The lizard in a spacesuit is stupid. The premise itself has potential but some of it is stupid. An accidental launch is reminiscent of an 80's kids movie. It doesn't make much sense that the kids would break into NASA anyways. The other big noticeable difference is the lack of celebrities doing the voice-work. The modern animated movie needs the celebrities for promotion. It's probably money well spend and this movie fails to do that.

There are better animated films out there, let's not beat around the bush, than 'Capture the Flag', but there are far worse out there as well.'Capture the Flag' is not a great film as such and has its flaws, instead it's a decent film that could have done with more polish. There is a lack of finesse in the quite strange character designs, that do look unfinished. And it is agreed that some of the story has its disjointed and rushed (much of the pacing is suitably efficient though) moments and that some of the scientific stuff does convolute the story and may go over most viewers' heads.However, there are also some lovely visuals. The colours are vibrant and atmospherically textured enough, and there is a lot of meticulous detail. The music score and song choices have a really nice Spanish flavour.While not perfect in execution, the script is amusing with some evidence of charm and heart. It also at least knows which target audience it's aiming for and makes a real effort to appeal to both children and adults, it doesn't completely succeed but still the children will have a few chuckles and like the characters and adults will appreciate the neat inside jokes and notion of the importance of family which has enough subtlety to make it too preachy in how it's delivered.Characters while lacking depth are likable and charming enough, and they are also nimbly voiced.All in all, could have been a better film with more polish, but not a bad film...to me actually it was pretty decent. 7/10 Bethany Cox

For every Inside Out there are a hundred Capture the Flag's. Considering the absurd amount of time and effort an animation feature takes to produce it's surprising that so often such little effort is made with the script and character development. Where animation masterminds Pixar really excel, putting technology aside for one moment, is how perfectly they make you connect with their characters, and this is no more obvious than when you watch a film where this simply doesn't happen. Home failed miserably with a great cast simply because all of the characters were so utterly annoying, Big Hero 6 an example of the contrary. The Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 are both out in the next few years and people (adults and children) care, and there's a reason for that.A great commercial animation should be judged on its ability to fascinate the kids, gratify the parents yet produce something that is more than a kids film which gratifies the parents; a movie that stands on its own as an objective piece of work, not something that qualifies as a two hour cheapo Saturday morning outing for dads. Capture the Flag is a perfect example of the type of tripe that will saturate the throwaway Sunday one pound a seat mini-mornings across the UK multiplexes for months to come.The film focuses on the Goldwing family; grandad Frank who missed out on his one chance to land on the moon, his son Scott, a potential astronaut on the ever pushed-back NASA missions and Mike, the youngster trying to reconcile his dad and grandad who haven't spoken for years for reasons initially unknown. A naughty billionaire, Richard Carson, attempts to discredit the initial moon landings as a diversion to his plans to mine Helium-3 from the satellite as an endeavour at super-villainy world energy control, and thus it quickly becomes super villain versus the Goldwings. There is potential for some good story lines here yet the film concentrates purely on silly action sequences and the child action- buck rather than anything remotely interesting.The film does try and engage its older audience at times, specifically with a clip of the not-dead Stanley Kubrick, working for Carson, directing a faked moon landing, but that's about it. The storyline is disjointed and rushed, and at no point feels like one you care about the outcome of.The other annoyance is that some of the main characters are so visually similar to characters from other films; Carson is almost identical in mannerisms and looks to Syndrome from the Incredibles, Frank Goldwing is basically Professor Callaghan from Big Hero 6 and Mike Goldwing's young sister is a lazily recreated version of Boo from Monsters Inc. It may seem fastidious to point out such similarities but it enhances the feeling of indolent character development that is such a persistent irritation throughout.Sometimes it feels harsh critiquing a film that is so obviously a throwaway movie directed at keeping kids vaguely amused for ninety minutes, but for all that Capture the Flag is a dull incidental movie that no-one will ever remotely remember.

Three kids who play a competitive sailboarding flag-capturing game end up involved in a moon mission to stop a mad squillionaire businessman from destroying evidence of the 1969 moon landing, and reunite the father and grandfather of one of them.This Spanish-produced CGI feature is really strange. On one level it works perfectly satisfactorily as a kids' action adventure movie. On another, it puzzles the adult viewer as it blends hyper-realistic scientific detail with things which have you going "Huh?" (not least of which is the way that NASA allows three pre-pubescent kids to wander in and out without any kind of security issues arising).There is also a credibility mismatch between the NASA mission hardware (conventional rocket, command module, LEM) and the baddie's state-of-the-art sci-fi spaceship and its payload of heavy duty machinery. I doubt that this will trouble the intended audience, though, most of whom will be of an age with the protagonists.This mismatch also applies on the animation side. The scientific detail is excellent, from NASA hardware to the moon's surface, gravity, and so on. But the human faces, particularly the kids, are all strangely bland, unfinished, and similar (apart from the chubby, scientific genius, incredibly annoying, ginger kid).I can't say that I thought this was great, but I guess it would be a lot easier to think more of it if I was age 9.