Sadly Over-hyped

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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)

One of the last of the disaster films which the 1970s doled out with great regularity, this is trashy sci-fi fun. The script by Stanley Mann and Edmund H. North is not exactly free of cliché but it is largely free of scientific accuracy. There are a few nice lines here and there though. The film's director Ronald Neame lived to be 99. While he may have been blessed with great longevity, he was not blessed with great talent as his direction is pretty mediocre. It's competent but nothing to get excited about. The visual effects are generally speaking not very good by 1979 standards but the devastation of New York City is effectively portrayed. Considering that it begins with the destruction of the World Trade Center, I found it more emotionally affecting than it was ever intended to be, unfortunately. I freely admit that the film is not very good but it appeals to the part of me that enjoys schlocky hokum and, on that level, I quite liked it. I dislike the term "guilty pleasure" but, if I were forced into a corner, I would describe it as one.The film stars Sean Connery in a great performance as the former NASA scientist Dr. Paul Bradley. He is contacted by his erstwhile employers, who inform him that the asteroid Orpheus was struck by a newly discovered comet several days earlier and a five mile fragment of said asteroid is hurtling towards a particular planet in the Solar System. It just so happens to be Earth, worst luck. Bradley left NASA because he objected to the fact that his orbital defence system Project Hercules, which he designed for just such an eventuality, was hijacked by the US military industrial complex and turned into a nuclear weapons platform to be used against the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China if necessary. In this respect, the plot foreshadows the proposed Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) - otherwise known as "Star Wars" - announced by Ronald Reagan in 1983. As it turns out, Hercules' fourteen nuclear missiles are not enough to destroy the meteor and, after some Cold War posturing, the USSR agrees to place their equivalent satellite Peter the Great at the disposal of Bradley and his fellow scientists.In one of her final film appearances before her tragic death in 1981, Natalie Wood, one of my favourite actresses of her generation, is very good as the Russian astrophysicist Dr. Tatiana Donskaya. Considering that Wood had been virtually absent from the silver screen since "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" a decade earlier, it is a pretty safe bet that she was cast more for her ability to speak fluent Russian than for her great skill as an actress. While she does not have as much opportunity to display it on this occasion as I would have liked, she does the best that she can with the material. I liked the nice understated romance between Bradley and Tatiana, though it is very underdeveloped even by the standards of understated romances! It's a shame that this was her only film with Connery as they had good chemistry. It would have been nice to see them in a better film together but, alas, it was not to be. Brian Keith gives the best performance in the film, stealing the show as the incredibly likable Soviet scientist Dr. Dubov. He has the lion's share of the best lines in the film, almost all of which are delivered in Russian. Keith was a very good actor but he was likewise cast because of his fluency in the language. In spite of a dodgy start, Karl Malden is good as Bradley's old friend Harry Sherwood. Martin Landau's performance as the film's not terribly bright or perceptive antagonist General Adlon is not one of his best but he does much better in the scenes in which he is calmer than in the ones in which he has to shout. Henry Fonda, also making one of his final film appearances, is very atypically bad in his cameo role as the President. Conversely, Trevor Howard makes the most of his limited screen time as the prominent British astronomer Sir Michael Hughes, even though he only ever appears on a TV screen. It also features nice small appearances from Joseph Campanella, Richard Dysart and Bibi Besch.Overall, I rather enjoyed this film because I turned my brain off and took very little of it seriously. I'd take it over "Armageddon" any day of the week.

Meteor probably gets all its points on IMDb because it has somehow lured a number of very high-profile actors into it - certainly not for the story or its portrayal thereof! Most of the errors are already listed under the Goofs section of the IMDb listing so I won't repeat them here other than to say there are a LOT! The credits list several technical advisers for the movie who should - in fact, WOULD - have been acutely aware of the errors and yet they either obviously ignored them (in which case, they shouldn't have got paid) or the director chose to ignore advice.The story could have been good because the likelihood of Earth suffering a major asteroid strike is actually very real - although such a strike would be much less likely to come from the main asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) than from an "Earth- Crosser" or NEO (Near earth Asteroid) which share their orbits with Earth and occasionally, as the name suggests, cross the path of Earth. One such major asteroid is 2004MN4, only discovered in 2004 and named Apophis, which could possibly strike the Earth in 2036 with devastating consequences because it is about 330 metres across and, depending on whether a strike was oceanic (73% chance) or terrestrial, destruction would either be by an enormous global tsunami or a "nuclear winter" following impact.Given the fact that we already know about Apophis (and other asteroids) humanity has plenty of time to prepare something like what was used (although that wasn't the plan) in the movie.Natalie Wood was given a great opportunity to demonstrate her native language as the interpreter to a Russian scientist played by Brian Kieth who collaborates with his American counterpart played by Sean Connery with Karl Malden and Martin Landau putting in professional performances in spite of a fairly "ordinary" script along with cameos by Henry Fonda as the American president and Trevor Howard as the British space boffin.If you're not very conversant with basic space exploration and won't notice all the errors, I guess this might be mildly enjoyable but don't expect much!

Ronald Neame("The Poseidon Adventure") directs this silly film about a huge meteor on a collision course with Earth after it collides with a comet. Professor Paul Bradley(Sean Connery) is assigned by the American President(Henry Fonda, not reprising his role from "Fail-Safe!) to come up with a way to stop it, by either deflecting or destroying it. There are attempts made to use an outer space array of nuclear missiles, but that won't work alone, so they team up with the Russian missiles(they have an identical program) but when that doesn't work sufficiently, they all prepare themselves for the oncoming disaster...One of the last disaster films in the cycle is pretty poor, though the good cast(including Natalie Wood, Brian Keith, and Martin Landau) do what they can, the script is clichéd and absurd; the result is good for some campy laughs, but that's all.