Meteor (1979)

Where to begin ? Probably best not to. An all star cast can't save this turkey with its B movie plot and dreadful special effects. Brian Keith and Natalie Wood as Soviet scientists ? Martin Landau as a red faced military clown ? Ed Wood gave us "Plan Nine From Outer Space" apparently Meteor is Plan Ten ! If you like SciFi you should watch it once, just to see how bad "bad" can be.

Fmovies: The name Samuel Z Arkoff appears first on the credits. This could be interesting or it could be terrible. Keep watching. The cast includes Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard and Henry Fonda. Now there is a decent bunch of actors, all usually good value. Keep watching. Directed by Ronald Neame, a distinguished British director by any standards. And then follows a disaster of a disaster film.

There is a strange dichotomy between the high quality of the cast and the low quality of the other elements in the film. The painfully meagre special effects, the shrill music, the leaden plot. It seems a strange brew and even a reviewer like myself who will always try to pick out some good points in a film am at a loss. The thing that distracted me the most was that the meteor itself, a wide lump of pitted and gruyered rock seemed to have a sound effect, like an engine! Perhaps it was my imagination.

This film is not good enough or bad enough to be a cult film. It is just tepid and flat and makes 'the Towering Inferno' look like the 'Citizen Kane' of disaster movies.

Really, there was nothing wrong with this film other then some basic scientific flaws, such as the over crowded asteroid belt and the appallingly bad Russian spoken by Wood and Keith. (My Ukrainain wife burst out laughing at their lines when we watched the DVD.) It is very interesting to me that the film was made prior to 1981 and the discovery of the Chixilub meteor crater in the Gulf of Mexico. This was the dinosaur killer that hit 65 million years ago. The science was right on about another Ice Age as well, even before the 1982 studies that predicted "nuclear winter" and were cited as the reason for the great die off in the late Cretaceous period. But the feel of the film as well as the acting and the believability was far better then "Armageddon", 20 years later. If "Meteor" had been blessed with the advanced special effects of the late 1990s, it would have been truly spectacular. Now a few problems: Those missiles were supposed to carry 100 megaton warheads. The largest nuclear weapon ever set off was 50 megatons and that was the size of a Greyhound bus. Also, the missiles had a distinct plastic model look right down to the seam where it looked as if the two halves had been glued together. Still, this should not detract form a very good action film as well as a warning as this really could happen and did at least 65 million years ago.

Meteor fmovies. Meteor (1979) 2 of 5 Dir: Ronald Neame Stars: Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden

Connery built a armed orbiting platform to protect the earth from s celestial attack. But like the government always does they take over the project and trains the nuclear payload smack dab at the old red menace. Connery is once again called back to realign the project when it is determined that a huge meteor that deflected off a comet is making a b-line to Earth. Together with the Russians will we be able to stop it?

'Meteor' is a fun movie with an all-star cast but the special effects are for the most part just plain bad. Even compared to films of the day ('Star Wars' and 'Alien' to name a few) they just can't quite cut it. It was a favorite as a kid but it gets a bit of groan out of me now. I guess so much for nostalgia.

When NASA realizes that a 5-mile wide chunk of asteroid loosed by a passing comet is on a collision course with the Earth, they send for a retired specialist to help them develop a strategy to avoid disaster. Unfortunately, it's the Cold War-era, and success will depend on cooperation with the Russians.

Meteor arrived at the tail end of the disaster film craze of the 1970s. It's certainly not as slick as some, and in historical perspective, the production values and atmosphere are no match for Star Wars (1977) or Alien (1979), despite both of those films having smaller budgets, but it is a competent sci-fi "thriller" that tends to surmount its limitations, at least if you stick it out past the slightly clunky beginning.

At first, it seems like the film might turn out to be a derivative cheese-fest. It has a documentary-styled opening with the tone of a 1960s science educational film. It has Star Wars-styled receding titles. It has text announcing settings in an overdone font like the poster art of the film. Some of the early spaceship shots are lit so that it's clear they were small models filmed in a studio. And a somewhat awkward expository flashback device is used.

But director Ronald Neame also shows signs of transcending his missteps early on. It surely helps that Sean Connery has the starring role, with Karl Malden in a prominent supporting role at the beginning of the film. The script is more humorous than we might expect, although the humor isn't unusual when delivered from Connery. "Why don't you stick a broom up my ass; I could sweep the carpet on my way out", is an early standout line, said by Connery when he's feeling pressure due to what's being asked of him.

The further we go into the film, the more suspenseful it becomes. The drama between NASA, the president and the Russians is beautifully written. The mini-disasters before the threatened big one are exciting and tragic. And the climax is simply fantastic--Neame builds an incredible amount of suspense with a simple countdown, then he follows it up with an equally intense scenario. All of this more gripping material is well acted and well directed, with a more epic scope than we might expect and relatively admirable special effects for the era.

Most interesting, watching Meteor at this point in time, are the countless cultural oddities we get from context. Like many films of the era, Cold War politics looms large. The hinge of the plot is reminiscent of Reagan's "Star Wars" program (maybe he got the idea from the film?--a frightening thought). There are a great many jokes about Russians--at one point, Russian higher-ups fret over whether the national budget can cover a long-distance telephone call. At another point, an American character ironically remarks, "Good news, the Russians are coming".

Even funnier are two oddities very relevant to our present culture. When news of the rogue asteroid is first announced on television, it's a brief update, then they're quickly back to a football game. There's no 24-hour coverage with trumped-up, dramatic graphics and music. And this is a scenario that actually warrants that treatment. The other instance is when American officials are excessively worried that revealing a particular bit of news might result in them being called "liars" and "warmongers". There was no G.W. Bush in the White House in this film.

But as fun as those cultural differences are to note, Meteor

As a person who loves disaster movies (in spite of it being a basically flawed genre), I could not hate this movie as much as most people seem to. It is a big budget disaster about a disaster and much about its construction is highly flawed, and yes the acting is mostly weak, and yes the effects are often obvious, and yes that was stock footage, but, BUT, this movie does deliver in one vital department: it blows sh*t up!

I'm sure by now most people are familiar with this as a folly for Sean Connery, and Henry Fonda, and the rest of the all star cast. It pretty much is, but that doesn't mean it isn't somewhat enjoyable. Some of the disaster and action sequences are quite good. And the special effects are really not so terrible for 1979 (not that special effects today are at all convincing by comparison). The score is really something hilarious to behold and the space photography is pretty overwrought (as if the movie were saying "holy crap, dude, look at this awesome spaceship!"). It is kind of neat to see Brian Kieth as a Russian. It's also a bit refreshing to see a movie pose a more plausible solution to meteors that landing a space shuttle full of oil drillers on one. It's also funny that a movie that precedes Reagan's Star Wars Project proposes a far better use for it. Another interesting prophetic note: the first thing destroyed in the USA in this film is the world trade center.

And if you still think this is the worst disaster movie ever, go and watch "Beyond The Posiedon Adventure" or "Raise The Titanic". Hell, even "Earthquake" was pretty damn bad in spite of it's "revolutionary" contribution to cinema. And besides, what other disaster movie has its heroes threatened by sewage? Now, I think that I could have made a better film out of this story, but that doesn't mean we can't watch this version and laugh. And besides, sh*t blows up!