Countdown (1968)

Er, not that "Countdown"

Another of my recent movie viewings was the vintage sci-fi movie Countdown. It being available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive (as well as on Amazon Prime Video for people who can do that), you're getting the review now.

To be honest, Countdown has a fairly straightforward plot. It's the late 1960s, when NASA has just started the Apollo program which of course in real history would go to put the first man on the moon about a year and a half after the movie's American release. But at the time the movie was made, there was still the space race with the Soviet Union.

Robert Duvall is Chiz, an astronaut who would make a logical candidate to be on the first mission to the moon, as he knows the various spacecraft inside and out. But a problem comes up. Intelligence gets wind that the Soviets are planning a mission to the moon that would beat the Americans there. Now, NASA (at least in the movie) had a special contingency plan for this, something that would involve sending one man to the moon on a one-way trip, to stay there in an already launched shelter module, until NASA can send an Apollo mission since those preparations take some time.

Now, I don't think I'd want to go on a mission like that, but Chiz would certainly be willing to do it. However, the word from intelligence about the Soviet mission is that it's going to be sending civilian scientists. All of the NASA astronauts had been military (I think every one of them had beeen Air Force pilots, much like Yuri Gagarin had been in the Soviet Union). Sending Chiz up wouldn't do because NASA think that it would be better PR to beat the Soviet civilian mission with a civilian mission of their own.

NASA decide on lunar geologist Lee Stegler (James Caan) for the mission, which as I said isn't going to be an easy one. Chiz starts training him, and understandably isn't sanguine about Lee's chances as they only have a few short weeks to prepare if they want to beat the Soviets. Still, it's a matter of national prestige, so they prepare.

Eventually, the day for the launch comes, and Lee goes off into space while his wife Mickey (Joanna Moore) stays at mission control to follow the mission. Unsurprisingly, the mission runs into technical glitches, because without those you wouldn't really have much of a movie, would you?

The plot of Countdown is a fairly simple one, and you can probably guess what's going to happen as it goes along. Still, it's very competently made, thanks in part to the direction by Robert Altman, who hadn't yet developed his later style yet. Caan and Duvall both do well, and it's interesting to see Ted Knight in a non-comic role as the press secretary who handles the press conferences.

If you want to sit back and be entertained by vintage science fiction, you could do a lot worse than to watch Countdown.