Meteor (1979)
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Meteor (1979)
SEAN CONNERY*NATALIE WOOD*KARL MALDEN*BRIAN KEITH*HENRY FONDA*JOSEPH CAMPANELLA*TREVOR HOWARD*MARTIN LANDAU
ABOVE: actor Bo Brundin as one of the technicians monitoring the approaching asteroid in METEOR.
ABOVE: Hong Kong harbor, just before a tidal wave hits it.
This film was at the tail-end of the disaster movie cycle of the seventies and was not very successful, either commercially or artistically. It made under $9 million at the box office back then; adjusted for inflation, that's about $25 million today. By comparison, DEEP IMPACT made about $140 million in 1998. I even read that the actors involved knew that they were making a dud during filming; that may be. It's not quite as laughable as THE SWARM (1978), but it's also dull. I saw this in a theater, back in '79, and I still remember the repetitive shots of the space rock on its way to Earth, accompanied by sound FX/music which tried to convey the impression of a huge breathing monster bearing down on the planet. That's about as creative as it gets here. Yet, there is the attraction of watching such an ultimate threat to our species; and, the later films mentioned above merely copied the plot - our planet is hit with smaller rocks, causing avalanches & tidal waves. There is no other way to really tell the tale, is there?
Near the climax, the last rock fragment manages to strike New York City. It is a dark irony that this scene is now the one truly disturbing set of images... as the collision destroys the twin towers of the World Trade Center, an eerie recreation/harbinger of actual events which did occur 22 years later. If such a rock did hit NYC, however - it's probably about 300 feet in length - I think more than the twin towers & Central Park would be destroyed (in the film, the rock 'luckily' targets the park, not most of the buildings). This sequence also contains stock footage of actual demolition of some buildings, kind of hokey. Or, would such a 'small' rock explode in the air before hitting the surface? We need an expert on this! BoG's Score: 5 out of 10
Base of Galactic Science Fiction :: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA :: Semi-Science Fiction Films :: sub-forums: Disaster Films
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