Meteor (1979)

*Get the film on Amazon here*

If Hollywood award gold is your benchmark for excellence in cinema, "Meteor" should have been one of the greatest films of all-time. The first nine credited cast members were all Oscar and Emmy nominees and winners sometime in their careers before and after the movie's release, with more golden talent further down in the cast list, credited and uncredited. Likewise with the director, screenwriters, soundtrack composer, cinematographer, editor, production designer, set decorator, and costume designer. It was nominated for an Oscar itself for Best Sound- the film's only nomination for any award from any awards group (getting beat by "Apocalypse Now"). However, the film craters thanks to an uninterested cast, hilarious special effects, screenplay padding, and its arrival a few years too late in the cooling disaster film subgenre.

Paul Bradley (a terminally angry Sean Connery) is called back in to his former employer NASA. A giant meteor is headed for Earth, arriving in six days. Paul was involved with the installation of nuclear missiles in space to thwart such a situation that will never happen, so instead the United States pointed the missles at those Commies in the U.S.S.R. As luck would have it, the Russians had their own system, and likewise pointed theirs at the United States. Neither country has the necessary firepower to destroy the meteor, but if we can just work together (any Cold War kid/Generation Xer remember détente?) we can defeat a common enemy and save this crazy screwed-up planet!

There's a germ of a good idea, copied many times later for straight-to-video and basic cable television pablum. A little online reading shows that some of the special effects companies involved were hired and fired, with the budget shrinking each time. I give plenty of leeway when it comes to special effects from the films and television of my childhood, but I couldn't help but shake my head at a lot of this. The production company was American-International Pictures, a studio known for its low budgets. It looks like their money was spent entirely on the cast. Natalie Wood doesn't appear until a third of the way through the picture but is involved in the best scene featuring duelling Russian translators. For a big piece of rock traveling at 30,000 miles per hour, this is one slow moving meteor. The nuclear missiles also move at a snail's pace, adding a few precious minutes to the running time. The underground command center looks like something out of a Bond film, disconcerting when you consider the film's lead. There's an argument during a Cabinet meeting that had me muttering "you can't fight in here, this is the war room!" as Landau portrays a typical Hollywood unhinged military officer, more concerned with the Russkies finding out about our missiles than trying to save the planet. Speaking of typical Hollywood unhinged military officers, a surprising amount of supporting cast members also guested on the television series "M*A*S*H," a show whose episodes I have seen many times over thanks to syndicated blocks of programming on over-the-air stations.

Like the previous year's "Avalanche," "Meteor" comes at the end of the disaster film cycle, which gave us classics like "The Poseidon Adventure," "Airport," and "The Towering Inferno," and the genre was skewered a year later by "Airplane!" The Best Sound Oscar nomination was a surprise, but considering the Special Visual Effects Academy Awards nominees for that year, there was no way "Meteor" was going to score anything else- Visual Effects winner "Alien," and nominees "The Black Hole," "Moonraker," "1941," and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

I remember wanting to see "Meteor" when it was released (I was eleven and already a rabid film fan, recognizing most of the cast names), and then when it appeared again on HBO. I never seemed to see it, not even clips, so watching it on a streaming service was a bittersweet nostalgia.

Stats:
(1979) 108 min. (*) out of five stars
-Directed by Ronald Neame
-Screenplay by Stanley Mann & Edmund H. North, Story by Edmund H. North
-Cast: Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard, Richard Dysart, Henry Fonda, Joe Campanella, Bibi Besch, Clyde Kusatsu, Peter Donat, Sybil Danning, Philip Sterling, Johnny Yune, Roy Edward Disney, John Spencer
(PG)- Contains physical violence, mild gore, profanity, alcohol use
*Academy Awards*
-Best Sound (lost to "Apocalypse Now")