Meteor (1979)

Director:

Ronald Neame

Writers:

Stanley Mann (screenplay)
Edmund H. North (screenplay)

Release Date:

19 October 1979 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline:

There's No Place On Earth To Hide!

Plot:

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

Plot Keywords:

Satellite | Comet | NASA | Russia | President

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar.

Cast

Sean Connery	...	Dr. Paul Bradley
Natalie Wood	...	Tatiana Nikolaevna Donskaya
Karl Malden	...	Harry Sherwood, NASA
Brian Keith	...	Dr. Alexei Dubov
Martin Landau	...	Major General Adlon
Trevor Howard	...	Sir Michael Hughes
Richard Dysart	...	Secretary of Defense
Henry Fonda	...	The President
Joseph Campanella	...	Lt. Gen. Easton
Bo Brundin	...	Rolf Manheim
Katherine De Hetre	...	Jan Watson
James G. Richardson	...	Alan Marshall
Roger Robinson	...	Bill Hunter
Michael Zaslow	...	Sam Mason
John McKinney	...	Peter Watson

Runtime:

107 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Russian

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

4-Track Stereo

Certification:

West Germany:12 | Italy:T | Australia:M | Argentina:13 | Chile:14 | Finland:K-16 | Norway:16 (1979) | Sweden:15 | UK:PG | USA:PG | Singapore:PG | UK:A (original rating)

Company:

American International Pictures (AIP)

Trivia:

The shots containing the buildings collapsing in the New York destruction scene were take from footage of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis Missouri. These buildings were desingned by Minoru Yamasaki the same designer as the World Trade Center which also got destroyed in the movie.

Goofs:

Factual errors: The splinter that hits New York City does not appear to be going very fast (no more than sixty miles an hour) when it hits; it glides lazily past the Statue of Liberty in one shot. An object traveling at that speed would do damage, but it wouldn't cause anywhere near the amount of devastation shown.

Quotes:

Tatiana Donskaya: One day you will come to Moscow and I will show you a clean subway.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Clerks. (1994)

Perestroika Saves The World

Meteor and When Time Ran Out marked the end of the decade of the disaster epic. I guess that Hollywood was just running out of ideas and that the formula of getting a bunch of big name players and put them in harm's way was wearing thin.

You can see that just about everybody here is bored, they all say the lines without any real conviction. Except for Martin Landau. As an Air Force General and Cold Warrior of the first order, he's extremely upset that the USA and the USSR have buried their differences to work on a real immediate problem. He resents Russians Brian Keith and Natalie Wood in the war room and Landau overacts outrageously.

A comet hurtling through the asteroid belt hit one of the big asteroids and sent one big chunk of rock and a whole bunch smaller ones as space calling cards speeding to Earth. That big guy if it hits spells the end of life on the planet.

Some criticism has been made that the special effects were a bit cheesy. By today's standards of course they were. So are some of those of the great Cecil B. DeMille. That's progress for you.

I'm not sure but this may have been the first time that Natalie Wood played someone of her own ancestry on film. Too bad she and Sean Connery as the NASA scientist didn't get to do something better before she passed away.

All the stars got a good pay day out of this though Sean Connery said there were some real scary moments with the cast trying to escape through the subway system with all the mud. A few times some people came close to really being buried in it for art's sake.

And this isn't a film to give your life for.