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Pretty Good

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Continuing my plan to watch every Sean Connery movie in order, I come to his second movie of 1979 Meteor.Plot In A Paragraph: The USA must join forces with the USSR in order to destroy a gigantic asteroid heading straight for Earth.Meteor isn't so much a disaster movie as it is a disaster. Almost every role is miscast, they are given ridiculous dialogue, the special effects are ropey at best and considering what is at stake, there is a lack of tension. I'm actually bored writing this review.Meteor didn't make a dent at the domestic box office, failing to recoup its $22 million budget.

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.

It looks like they blew the budget on the actors and were forced to compromise with some shoddy, low-budget effects work in this tacky disaster movie which serves as a precursor to DEEP IMPACT which arrived some twenty years later. Sadly, it's a rather dull affair which only picks up in the last half an hour and consists of endless talk and discussions before then. The actors and actresses do their best with the unbelievable dialogue but even they come off looking stilted and bored.It's a shame that this movie is so poor, as the cast is one of those ensemble ones to die for. A fifty year old Sean Connery takes the male lead, and plays his typical character: charming, attractive to the women, and always in command. Yeah, right. Thankfully, the ever-great Karl Malden is around and elevates the film a notch or two, showing Connery the real way to do things. Natalie Wood is the attractive female Russian, but in retrospect her presence is dominated by the viewer's recollection of her tragic death a couple of years later. Brian Keith is amusing as a Russian diplomat, while Martin Landau has the showy role of a stuffy US general forced to disagree with everybody's plans. In smaller roles, Henry Fonda pops up pointlessly as the US president, Trevor Howard is a British contact, and eagle-eyed viewers will spot Eurotrash legend Sybil Danning in a cameo as a skier in Zurich who gets buried under an avalanche.The special effects are amateurish in nature and really have to be seen to be believed. The space effects are obvious matte work and were nothing for George Lucas to worry about. Simple red lights stand in for various shards of meteorite which hit Earth beforehand and cause some minor damage. Whenever there's an explosion, the screen just fills with white so you can't see anything. One effect I did like was of a huge tidal wave coming around a street corner in Hong Kong, but that's the single impressive effort in the entire movie.If the first hour and a quarter is mere small talk and general chit-chat about what to do, then the final half-hour becomes typical disaster fare when events take a different direction, although by then it's too little, too late. The various actors and actresses suffer a shard hitting their complex and are forced to escape through a flooding subway. It's a chance for the guys and girls to get really muddy and actually take part in some action before the ending. As this is a mainstream title, the actual outcome is never once in doubt which makes any tension-building scenes relatively pointless. Worth watching for disaster movie fans; a gigantic bore for just about everyone else.

A 1979 classic Doomsday film. It's a little dated, but very enjoyable for the Scifi Buff. It has a list of top of line Actors from the 1940's all the way up to the 1970's. Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith,and Henry Fonda. I like the soundtrack, It has that 1970's synthesize music that's just classic. The story line is good for it's time , even though it's kinda out of date scientific wise. The special effects are also kinda dated, But hey it was the 1970's, no heavy duty computer special effects like we have today. I give it 8 out of 10. Like most 1970's dooms day films of the time, you just have to take a little grain of salt for the dated look of the film. If you can get past that, your in for one enjoyable movie that you just might want to add to your film collection.