I've got a brother-in-law who's a James Bond fan, so for the past several years I've been getting him DVDs of various non-Bond Sean Connery (mostly) movies as Christmas gifts. Recently, I saw another new-to-me Connery film on one of the streaming services, I think Pluto TV: Meteor.
Connery plays Paul Bradley, who at the start of the movie is participating in a boat race. But the Coast Guard approaches his boat, basically forcing them to bow out of the regatta because Bradley is needed elsewhere. Indeed, the federal government already has a special plane laid out for him to take him to Houston, and from there to Washington DC.
Houston means the headquarters of NASA, which has learned something shocking and disastrous. They had a crew on the way to Mars for the first manned mission, but sent that crew out to the asteroid belt when space events intervened. Two celestial bodies collided, sending one of the asteroids out of its asteroid belt orbit and somehow resulting in the space crew's death. But scientists on earth have calculated the asteroid's new orbit and have found that it's going to collide with earth! And that collision is going to happen in six days!
Yeah right; never mind that comets don't make it that distance in six days or that even today are generally only able to calculate probabilistic chances for an asteroid to hit the earth. This asteroid is five miles in diameter, and something that big hitting the earth is going to cause cataclysmic damage. Consider that the Tunguska event is generally believed to have been caused by something maybe 200 feet in diameter, which is less than 1% of the diameter of this asteroid.
So what is Dr. Bradley supposed to do? NASA head Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden) knows that Dr. Bradley was one of the lead scientists working on a top-secret project called Hercules. Bradley's conception for Hercules was to send a space station-sized satellite armed with a dozen or so nuclear missiles, even though this would have violated the Outer Space Treaty (I think that's the appropriate treaty), which banned putting nuclear weapons in outer space. Bradley's idea was that the nuclear missiles could be used to intercept any incoming celestial bodies, pushing them off the orbit that would have them hit earth. After all, if you can hit an object far enough away, it doesn't take much to deflect it into missing the earth.
Unsurprisingly, however, military types like Gen. Adlon (Martin Landau) took over the project since they saw the military usefulness of being able to have nuclear weapons in space pointed at the Soviet Union. He got Hercules' mission changed to one targeting the Soviets, and he'd be pissed if the Soviets found out that the US had violated this treaty. Thankfully, the President (Henry Fonda) has the intelligence that the Soviets have a similar system, and that if the two countries combined their systems, they could deflect the asteroid enough to save Earth.
Of course, this means making Hercules public and getting the Soviets to admit to their system. The Soviets send to America their chief scientist, Dubov (Brian Keith), and his interpreter, Tatiana (Natalie Wood) to assist the Americans before the asteroid can hit Earth. But since this is a disaster movie, we know that at least pieces of the asteroid are going to hit and give the producers opportunites for special effects.
The problem with Meteor is that neither half of the movie -- either the Cold War story or the disaster climax -- is given enough focus to make it work well. As a result, we get something that's talky without the payoff at the end that in theory is what the audience wants to see. It also doesn't help that a lot of the cast seem to have taken on their roles simply for the paycheck. Some criticize the special effects, but I think this is unfair, since they're not notably bad for the era. Sure, filmmakers can do things better today, but that misses the point.
Still, Meteor is moderately entertaining, and the sort of movie that's probably worth one viewing since you can stream it.
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