Meteor

Day 135 - 5/15/09 - Movie #134

BEFORE: The 1970's were a different time - today, if a giant asteroid were found to be hurtling toward the earth at destructive speed, we'd probably send up a rocket, along with a ragtag group of renegade astronauts, with a plan to blow it up that's so crazy, it just might work. The proper procedure back then, however, was to throw as much acting talent at it as possible - will the combined forces of Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, and Henry Fonda as the President be enough to divert the meteor?

THE PLOT: After a collision with a comet, a nearly 8km wide piece of the asteroid "Orpheus" is heading towards Earth...

AFTER: This movie is a strange pre-cursor to future space/disaster films - it's got the tidal waves and impending destruction of New York seen in "Day After Tomorrow", the team-up of the U.S. and Soviet space program, as seen in "2010", and it's got NASA turning to a veteran action-movie star for help, as in "Armageddon". (which reminds me, I should add "Armageddon" to my want list...)

The technology seen in the underground control center looks ridiculously outdated. One monitor in particular, the one that shows the trajectory of the asteroid, isn't a CRT at all - it's a hard screen of plastic with lettering on it, and red lights representing how close the asteroid will be on each day - it looks like one of those old electric football games from the 1950's! (Plus, how did some technician know what trajectory the meteor would take when he designed it?)

A "splinter" piece of the meteor strikes New York, and instead of complicated special FX, the filmmakers chose to run every piece of stock footage you've ever seen of buildings being destroyed or imploded. Why not run the Hindenburg explosion while you're at it? Guess they blew the effects budget on all that big-name talent...

Aiming nuclear missiles at a meteor to destroy it should have been exciting - but standing around in a control room, watching the action on TV monitors? Not so much.

RATING: 3 out of 10 ICBMs.