Meteor (1979)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

the audience applauded

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

I vaguely remember watching this movie on TV several times as a kid but couldn't remember a thing about it, so I decided to finally watch it again to refresh my memory. Given the year, I expected it to be a cheesy laugh riot in 1970s excess. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised.Don't get me wrong; Meteor is definitely a fourth rate Irwin Allen-esque disaster film and doesn't hold a candle to The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Some of the acting is ridiculous, especially Martin Landau, who literally screams the entire time. The movie also feels very small. I remember Irwin Allen films feeling more epic in scale because of the direction. Meteor feels more like a TV movie. However, it was actually much better than I expected for a film of this type. I was pretty entertained throughout and thought the special effects were surprisingly good for 1979. Okay, not amazing obviously but not 1950s B movie sci-fi bad. Some of the action scenes were also pretty good, especially the one that takes place in a NYC subway. The best thing about Meteor was how straightforward the story was. Unlike movies today that try so hard to appear intelligent by throwing in too many characters, subplots and convoluted plot points, the plot is simple. Basically, the USA wants to use a space weapon to destroy a meteor but is in a dilemma because using it would mean unveiling it to the world, pissing off the Russians and painting itself as a hypocrite. However, as the meteor approaches, common sense prevails and the US decides to not only unveil the weapon but work with the USSR to take the meteor down. That's the story, short and sweet.Not only is Meteor an okay film, I think it might've been a trailblazer. Before this movie, disaster films were always specific to one location (airplane, ship, Los Angeles, burning skyscraper). This is probably the first disaster movie that showed disaster happening around the globe, a la The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. So it should get extra credit for that alone.All in all, an entertaining flick. Don't listen to the naysayers totally trashing it as crap. It's cheesy, yes, but it's no less watchable or cheesy than any modern day disaster film.

At a time of declining demands for visual disaster on the silver screen, a sixteen-million-dollar-production brings together an star ensemble led by Sean Connery to join a Ronald Neame directed picture "Meteor". The 1970s, a decade starting out with high-budgeted shallow Hollywood movies as "Airport" (1970) and a better directed "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) or "The Towering Inferno" (1974) envisioned by John Guillermin had been exploring the limits of on-set pyro- and hydraulic techniques to establish a realistic experience for the audience worth a ticket at the box office apart from the emerging Avantgarde of independent productions as "The French Connection" (1971) directed by William Friedkin.In the case of "Meteor" the expectations could hardly be fulfilled. A cast strapped to shut-in interior sets with an occasional exterior action sequence out of story-telling relevance beside the destruction itself. Director Roland Neame already finding his directorial peak with "The Odessa File" in 1974, coming from cinematographic backgrounds, did the job for hire to a doomed-to-fail script. When the previously mentioned disaster movies could count on physical elements as air, water or fire at hand to create destruction on a dosage, there had been "Meteor" in a hard-to-crack nut shell by cross-cutting into the distance of outer space in order to create a non-existing suspense for this particular picture.A picture totally relying on the native giving charms of its cast, Sean Connery kept his head high as the character of Dr. Paul Bradley in collaboration with stand-clear professionalism of actor Karl Malden in the role of Harry Sherwood, hiring the best of their fields to solve the problem of an approaching asteroid on collision course with earth. Director Ronald Neame tried hard to keep the story visually attracted enough for the audience with shifting camera movements within space-monitoring observation rooms.Nevertheless nothing could hide the fact that the spectators had been unable to identify with the approaching menace. A fact, which was picked up by J.J. Abrams in the 1990s to write the screenplay to "Armageddon" (1998), creating an enhanced story-line, where the star-spangled cast actually took on the death-bringing meteor heads on by getting rocket-shot into space. In retrospective, "Meteor" had been left alone as a relic of its time, the aftermath of an era of Hollywood disaster movies in the 1970s, which due to there high production costs paid the bills for every one involved.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (for Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

A meteor is about to hit earth.Not to be confused with Irwin Allen's City Beneath The Sea (1971), another disaster movie about a giant rock that is about to hit the earth.The director of Meteor, Ronald Neame, also directed The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and you can hear the guy talk for nearly two hours on the DVD commentary for The Poseidon Adventure. He comes over as a guy who knows his stuff and for this reason you have to wonder what went wrong when he directed Meteor?I am not saying that Meteor is bad, far from it, in fact I would rather watch this than a few of the disaster films that came out in the 1990s (Twister, Deep Impact). The wonderfully dated special effects (no CGI, great!) steal this film and it is fun seeing Karl Malden do two disaster movies in one year (he was also in Beyond The Poseidon Advenure in 1979).In a nutshell: Meteor is okay.

All star science fiction movie made by American International Pictures that's in the vein of disaster movies of the '70s.A comet strikes an asteroid belt, and flings a fragment 5 miles long into collision course with earth. Americans have put in orbit satellite carrying 14 rockets each with 100 megaton warhead called "Hercules". They are to use it to shoot the in coming meteor , but it won't be enough to stop it. They must work with the Russians who has similar weapon called "Peter the Great" in orbit and combine their forces to stop the meteor.This movie was made before Walter Alvarez's meteor extinction theory of the dinosaurs. It's foresighted for its time in this respect. The movie has satirical scenes of powers not agreeing to cooperate despite the immanent danger, but it's done deliciously, and fun to watch.The movie has qualities of the low budget science fiction movies of the '50s. But it's done in much grander scale. Good movie that captures the atmosphere of the '70s well.