Mar
8
“Meteor” Review
Filed Under Movies
With the recent non-news that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs and not HIV-AIDS, I thought I’d watch a forgotten gem of the disaster genre, the 1979 Ronald Neame film, “Meteor.” The film stars Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Martin Landau and Henry Fonda. I know, right. What a cast! This being a disaster picture, most of them go to waste. Landau, however, stands out as the pissed-off general who hates everyone’s ideas. He dies.
“Meteor” not only brought an end to the waning popularity of disaster movies in the ’70s, but its box office failure apparently bankrupted American International Pictures, FTW. As far as I’m concerned, any movie in which Sean Connery delivers this line, “Why don’t you stick a broom up my ass? I can sweep the carpet on the way out,” belongs on a goddamn AFI list for the 100 Best Sean Connery Zingers.
“Meteor,” as you may have guessed, is about a piece of space debris — one about the size of Bruce Willis’ ego (i.e. five miles wide) — that’s on a collision course with the planet Earth. Connery plays Dr. Paul Bradley, a former NASA scientist who developed an orbital platform that can launch nukes at any chunk of rock hurtling towards our planet. However, Dr. Bradley left NASA when his project, dubbed Hercules, was redesigned by the U.S. military, and the missiles were trained on the Soviet Union instead. Now an actual meteor is heading for Earth, and the government desperately needs Dr. Bradley to help them reconfigure Hercules to do what it was originally intended to. Oh, and they need to ask the USSR if they’ll be so kind as to use their own version of Hercules for the same purpose. Uncharacteristically, the U.S. doesn’t have enough nuclear firepower to do the job alone. This is what happens under the Henry Fonda Administration. The country goes straight to hell.
One problem I have with disaster films is that they have so many A-listers and so little time. Natalie Wood shows up incredibly late in the film as a Russian translator and Dr. Bradley’s love interest. (Fun fact: Connery hooked up with Wood’s bosomy sister, Lana, in his penultimate turn as James Bond, 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever.”) “Meteor” runs less than two hours, so most of the stars aren’t given a hell of a lot of do beyond lending their famous names to an Irwin Allen wannabe. Also, by virtue of the fact that the disaster is impending, the movie is kind of one long waiting game. Splinters of the meteor come crashing down late in the second act, including one that takes out the WTC, but the middle section of the film is a slog. We get lots of scenes of people being curt with one another.
The climax involves Dr. Bradley leading a group of people to safety through what appears to be a mudslide in a NYC subway tunnel after a splinter of meteor crashes down on top of their heads. It’s kind of a weird ending for a movie called “Meteor.” I was hoping we’d get to see Connery dressed up like an astronaut at some point during the proceedings. Rather, we get a mud-caked Connery. Bullshit.
How does “Meteor” stack up against that theatrically-released telefilm, “‘Deep Impact,” and Michael Bay’s theatrically-released commercial for massive-scale destruction, “Armageddon?” Well, all three are weak sauce for different reasons. But only “Meteor” has the broom-up-the-ass line. So it edges out the competition by a whisker.
-Brad Lohan
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