Leofwine_draca It looks like they blew the budget on the actors and were forced to compromise with some shoddy, low-budget effects work in this tacky disaster movie which serves as a precursor to DEEP IMPACT which arrived some twenty years later. Sadly, it's a rather dull affair which only picks up in the last half an hour and consists of endless talk and discussions before then. The actors and actresses do their best with the unbelievable dialogue but even they come off looking stilted and bored.It's a shame that this movie is so poor, as the cast is one of those ensemble ones to die for. A fifty year old Sean Connery takes the male lead, and plays his typical character: charming, attractive to the women, and always in command. Yeah, right. Thankfully, the ever-great Karl Malden is around and elevates the film a notch or two, showing Connery the real way to do things. Natalie Wood is the attractive female Russian, but in retrospect her presence is dominated by the viewer's recollection of her tragic death a couple of years later. Brian Keith is amusing as a Russian diplomat, while Martin Landau has the showy role of a stuffy US general forced to disagree with everybody's plans. In smaller roles, Henry Fonda pops up pointlessly as the US president, Trevor Howard is a British contact, and eagle-eyed viewers will spot Eurotrash legend Sybil Danning in a cameo as a skier in Zurich who gets buried under an avalanche.The special effects are amateurish in nature and really have to be seen to be believed. The space effects are obvious matte work and were nothing for George Lucas to worry about. Simple red lights stand in for various shards of meteorite which hit Earth beforehand and cause some minor damage. Whenever there's an explosion, the screen just fills with white so you can't see anything. One effect I did like was of a huge tidal wave coming around a street corner in Hong Kong, but that's the single impressive effort in the entire movie.If the first hour and a quarter is mere small talk and general chit-chat about what to do, then the final half-hour becomes typical disaster fare when events take a different direction, although by then it's too little, too late. The various actors and actresses suffer a shard hitting their complex and are forced to escape through a flooding subway. It's a chance for the guys and girls to get really muddy and actually take part in some action before the ending. As this is a mainstream title, the actual outcome is never once in doubt which makes any tension-building scenes relatively pointless. Worth watching for disaster movie fans; a gigantic bore for just about everyone else.

David Holt (rawiri42) Meteor probably gets all its points on IMDb because it has somehow lured a number of very high-profile actors into it - certainly not for the story or its portrayal thereof! Most of the errors are already listed under the Goofs section of the IMDb listing so I won't repeat them here other than to say there are a LOT! The credits list several technical advisers for the movie who should - in fact, WOULD - have been acutely aware of the errors and yet they either obviously ignored them (in which case, they shouldn't have got paid) or the director chose to ignore advice.The story could have been good because the likelihood of Earth suffering a major asteroid strike is actually very real - although such a strike would be much less likely to come from the main asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) than from an "Earth- Crosser" or NEO (Near earth Asteroid) which share their orbits with Earth and occasionally, as the name suggests, cross the path of Earth. One such major asteroid is 2004MN4, only discovered in 2004 and named Apophis, which could possibly strike the Earth in 2036 with devastating consequences because it is about 330 metres across and, depending on whether a strike was oceanic (73% chance) or terrestrial, destruction would either be by an enormous global tsunami or a "nuclear winter" following impact.Given the fact that we already know about Apophis (and other asteroids) humanity has plenty of time to prepare something like what was used (although that wasn't the plan) in the movie.Natalie Wood was given a great opportunity to demonstrate her native language as the interpreter to a Russian scientist played by Brian Kieth who collaborates with his American counterpart played by Sean Connery with Karl Malden and Martin Landau putting in professional performances in spite of a fairly "ordinary" script along with cameos by Henry Fonda as the American president and Trevor Howard as the British space boffin.If you're not very conversant with basic space exploration and won't notice all the errors, I guess this might be mildly enjoyable but don't expect much!

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.

pcgamerquadcore A 1979 classic Doomsday film. It's a little dated, but very enjoyable for the Scifi Buff. It has a list of top of line Actors from the 1940's all the way up to the 1970's. Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith,and Henry Fonda. I like the soundtrack, It has that 1970's synthesize music that's just classic. The story line is good for it's time , even though it's kinda out of date scientific wise. The special effects are also kinda dated, But hey it was the 1970's, no heavy duty computer special effects like we have today. I give it 8 out of 10. Like most 1970's dooms day films of the time, you just have to take a little grain of salt for the dated look of the film. If you can get past that, your in for one enjoyable movie that you just might want to add to your film collection.