Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Americans and Russians must put aside their differences to fight meteors. Mediocre disaster flick with the obligatory "all-star cast" these things tended to have. Most of the cast, which includes big stars like Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Karl Malden, and Natalie Wood, only marginally embarrass themselves. They can't do much with the poor script. The worst performance in the film comes from Martin Landau, who is so ridiculously hammy in this I'm surprised he ever worked again. The best performance is that of Brian Keith, who's very amusing as the Soviet scientist Dr. Dubov. The special effects are laughably bad at times. I could live with that if the rest of the movie weren't so damned boring. That's Meteor's biggest fault - it takes what should be an exciting, nail-biting premise and turns it into an uninvolving Cold War melodrama. To be clear, I don't hate disaster movies. There were a lot of entertaining movies of this type made in the '70s, when this fad was at its height of popularity. Unfortunately, Meteor isn't one of them.

You have to think that if Irwin Allen and his partners had any idea what a revolution was coming in terms of computers and graphics they might have waited a decade or so before attempting Meteor. As it was, they did the best they could with what they had and the result is an excellent disaster picture, far superior in story and character development to the multitude of "meteor aiming for Earth" movies that came afterwards. I've downgraded the picture to a "7" (if I was writing this in 1980 I would have given it an 8) because of the dated special effects, which include avalanches and tidal waves (before we started calling them by other names)but it is precisely the graphics or lack thereof that makes this a superior film. More recent attempts on the same subject get bogged down in the fabulous special effects, but Meteor had to flesh out its political and practical story lines to reach its full feature length. At times it seems like the movie is about to forget the looming disaster and lose itself in the relationship between Connery (an American scientist) and Wood (his Soviet counterpart), like so many mediocre films, but it never crosses that line and that story line is redeemed when Natalie heads back to Moscow after everything is finished, despite Sean's not-so-subtle hints she should defect. I should add the semi-obligatory homage to Natalie Wood in one of her last roles: she looks good and clearly fulfilled her early promise as an artist.

Gotta love these 1970's disaster films! The deadpan dialogue. The soap opera sub-plots. The missiles look like they were made from Revell model kits. But "Meteor" still delivers the goods and keeps you entertained. Far more so than some other "big-budget" films in the same category today. The A-list actors seem to enjoy being in this film. Also Brian Keith's and Natalie Wood's authentic Russian dialogue gives a legitimacy to the story line. "Armageddon" may have had 20x the budget, but it didn't deliver even 1/10th the entertainment as this film!

Many have speculated that the dinosaurs that once ruled the planet were wiped out when a planetary body made contact with Earth sixty-five million years ago. And every once in a while in cinematic history, filmmakers have exploited this particular fear that similar collision between our planet and either a comet or meteor could do cataclysmic, end-of-the-world type damage to our planet, as was shown in films such as 1933's DELUGE and 1951's WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, and which would be shown yet again in 1998's Armageddon and DEEP IMPACT. The first real film in our present context to show what might very well happen in the admittedly unlikely event of such an interstellar collision was the 1979 science fiction/disaster film METEOR.In this film, scientists have discovered a five mile-wide meteor named Orpheus, which was blasted out of the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter by a collision with a comet. An American space crew exploring the asteroid belt is killed in that collision; and what scientists discover next is that the resulting asteroid that was knocked out of its orbit is on a direct collision course with Earth—a collision that, in the words of a prominent astronomer (Sean Connery), could create another Ice Age. The only hope anyone has of stopping Orpheus from penetrating Earth's atmosphere is to blast it with nuclear weapons; and while both the U.S. and Russia have such weapons in orbit, they are pointed downward at one another. Over the strenuous objections of a virulent anti-Communist general (Martin Landau), Connery and NASA's chief (Karl Malden), together with Connery's Russian counterpart (Brian Keith) manage to get both American and Russian nuclear arsenals pointed away from Earth, and towards the approaching meteor. In the meantime, however, splinter pieces of Orpheus do manage to penetrate the atmosphere. One causes a massive avalanche that buries a ski resort; another creates a 100 foot-high tsunami that wipes out Hong Kong; and a third, much larger piece nails New York City, creating a horrific situation in which Connery, Malden, Keith, and Keith's assistant (Wood) must crawl out of their underground tomb, through a muddy subway tunnel, and hope that their nuclear gambit succeeds.Released in late 1979 at the very tail end of the disaster film craze, METEOR did only moderately well at the box office, and, unsurprisingly, was almost universally panned by the critics. Furthermore, given its having been made under the auspices of the low-budget American International Pictures company, it clearly relies just a bit too much on the use of stock footage (specifically from previous films like AVALANCHE and TIDAL WAVE) instead of new special effects (in this respect, DEEP IMPACT is clearly the superior "space rock" movie). And in terms of acting, METEOR falls a bit short there too, especially in the overzealous performance of Landau, normally a very good actor, and a melodramatic script that occasionally veers uncomfortably close to unintentional humor.In other aspects, though Meteor does manage to overcome its pratfalls, due to solid performances by Connery, Malden, Fonda (as the President), Richard Dysart, Joseph Campanella, Bibi Besch, Sybil Danning, and Michael Zaslow. And where there is no stock footage used, the destruction sequences supervised by Glen Robinson, who had won an Oscar for his work on the 1974 science fiction/disaster film EARTHQUAKE, are about as good as anything seen in the days before CGI, especially in the near-total destruction of New York, even though, in retrospect, one is reminded too much of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in those images. As a result, though it is a forgotten relic from a less-than-sophisticated era in science fiction and special effects, METEOR, under the professional direction of Neame (who helmed THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE for "disaster master" Irwin Allen in 1972), is nevertheless and entertaining, if somewhat dreadful look at what could possibly happen to Earth if a wayward interstellar body, be it a meteor or a comet, ever got past our protective atmosphere. For all its pratfalls, and despite its being a product of the Cold War in its plotting, its essential theme remains timeless and timely.