Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

GusF 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.

virek213 Many have speculated that the dinosaurs that once ruled the planet were wiped out when a planetary body made contact with Earth sixty-five million years ago. And every once in a while in cinematic history, filmmakers have exploited this particular fear that similar collision between our planet and either a comet or meteor could do cataclysmic, end-of-the-world type damage to our planet, as was shown in films such as 1933's DELUGE and 1951's WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, and which would be shown yet again in 1998's Armageddon and DEEP IMPACT. The first real film in our present context to show what might very well happen in the admittedly unlikely event of such an interstellar collision was the 1979 science fiction/disaster film METEOR.In this film, scientists have discovered a five mile-wide meteor named Orpheus, which was blasted out of the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter by a collision with a comet. An American space crew exploring the asteroid belt is killed in that collision; and what scientists discover next is that the resulting asteroid that was knocked out of its orbit is on a direct collision course with Earth—a collision that, in the words of a prominent astronomer (Sean Connery), could create another Ice Age. The only hope anyone has of stopping Orpheus from penetrating Earth's atmosphere is to blast it with nuclear weapons; and while both the U.S. and Russia have such weapons in orbit, they are pointed downward at one another. Over the strenuous objections of a virulent anti-Communist general (Martin Landau), Connery and NASA's chief (Karl Malden), together with Connery's Russian counterpart (Brian Keith) manage to get both American and Russian nuclear arsenals pointed away from Earth, and towards the approaching meteor. In the meantime, however, splinter pieces of Orpheus do manage to penetrate the atmosphere. One causes a massive avalanche that buries a ski resort; another creates a 100 foot-high tsunami that wipes out Hong Kong; and a third, much larger piece nails New York City, creating a horrific situation in which Connery, Malden, Keith, and Keith's assistant (Wood) must crawl out of their underground tomb, through a muddy subway tunnel, and hope that their nuclear gambit succeeds.Released in late 1979 at the very tail end of the disaster film craze, METEOR did only moderately well at the box office, and, unsurprisingly, was almost universally panned by the critics. Furthermore, given its having been made under the auspices of the low-budget American International Pictures company, it clearly relies just a bit too much on the use of stock footage (specifically from previous films like AVALANCHE and TIDAL WAVE) instead of new special effects (in this respect, DEEP IMPACT is clearly the superior "space rock" movie). And in terms of acting, METEOR falls a bit short there too, especially in the overzealous performance of Landau, normally a very good actor, and a melodramatic script that occasionally veers uncomfortably close to unintentional humor.In other aspects, though Meteor does manage to overcome its pratfalls, due to solid performances by Connery, Malden, Fonda (as the President), Richard Dysart, Joseph Campanella, Bibi Besch, Sybil Danning, and Michael Zaslow. And where there is no stock footage used, the destruction sequences supervised by Glen Robinson, who had won an Oscar for his work on the 1974 science fiction/disaster film EARTHQUAKE, are about as good as anything seen in the days before CGI, especially in the near-total destruction of New York, even though, in retrospect, one is reminded too much of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in those images. As a result, though it is a forgotten relic from a less-than-sophisticated era in science fiction and special effects, METEOR, under the professional direction of Neame (who helmed THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE for "disaster master" Irwin Allen in 1972), is nevertheless and entertaining, if somewhat dreadful look at what could possibly happen to Earth if a wayward interstellar body, be it a meteor or a comet, ever got past our protective atmosphere. For all its pratfalls, and despite its being a product of the Cold War in its plotting, its essential theme remains timeless and timely.

AaronCapenBanner 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.

johnp46260 This movie is, above all, an egregious waste of a world-class cast. Did the producers spend all of their money hiring the cast and have nothing left with which to build a decent vehicle for them? That seems to be the only explanation. Everything about 'Meteor' is cheesy: the dialogue, the 'special' effects, the plot, the direction, the music, the editing. Most of the actors look as if they are sleepwalking through their scenes; as if their awareness that they are participating in cinematic malpractice is creating an apathetic milieu. The only bright spot is Brian Keith, who speaks all of his lines in very convincing Russian. He must have worked very hard to pull that off. Natalie Wood also converses in Russian, but this was almost her native tongue, so it comes naturally to her.SPOILER: Very little in 'Meteor' makes sense. Missiles launch in slow motion; people run downhill to escape a tsunami; scientists say that all of the missiles MUST arrive simultaneously in order to have the desired effect, but success is achieved when they arrive at separate times; the subway floods at the end because of 'the river'(?) but more likely because the producers wanted to add another element of danger and a few more minutes to the running time.All in all, 'Meteor' is a total waste. It is only memorable as a small monument to ineptitude.