Countdown (1968)
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Countdown (1968)
co-starring JOANNA MOORE*CHARLES AIDMAN*STEVE IHNAT*BARBARA BAXLEY
Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN
This was also an early pairing of stars Caan & Duvall, who would appear together in several more films, like THE GODFATHER and THE KILLER ELITE (75). Ihnat is the NASA administrator in charge; Michael Murphy has an early small role here as another astronaut and Ted Knight is a press secretary. It's based on the novel "The Pilgrim Project" - that's NASA's name for this mission.
The worst fault of the film, though, is that it's simply dull. Altman does try to lend a realistic tone to everything but it's as if he tried too hard; it's like watching the day-to-day experiences of some acquaintances similar to your own dull day-to-day life - you can't really expect to get excited by such a story. There's no excitement generated by the time Caan actually does go into space; there's a strange lack of tension, especially as it's the first time man is going this far. Caan does encounter a problem when he reaches the moon (and, by this time, it was a realistic depiction of the moon surface, though obviously filmed in the U.S. desert somewhere), but it remains a boring exercise and ends abruptly at the point when we would expect a dramatic pay-off. Still, this can be interesting as a version of the actual moon landing, just one year beforehand. Back then, in '68, it seems like everyone took for granted that the actual moon landing would happen very soon.
Base of Galactic Science Fiction :: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA :: Silver Age of Science Fiction Cinema
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