Miracle Mile

Recently I was flipping through PlutoTV to see what movies they had on. One on their 80s channel that had an interesting plot synopsis was Miracle Mile. Based on the synopsis, I decided to give it a watch.

Anthony Edwards, later of the TV show ER, plays Harry, a young man living in Los Angeles. One day, he visits the museum at the La Brea tar pits, and sees a woman he's intrigued with. The two run into each other outside, where he finds that her name is Julie (Mare Winningham). They hit it off, and decide they'll meet again later that evening at the all-night diner where Julie works.

Unfortunately, Harry falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he finds that his alarm never went off and that it's four in the morning. So he goes down to the diner, hoping to find Julie still on her shift. She's gone home, of course, so Harry decides to call her and apologize. He gets her answering machine, and is about to go back into the diner when the phone rings again. Now, this is the late 1980s, so Julie wouldn't have had caller ID to tell her what number the call came from. And obviously, almost nobody has a cell phone unless they're rich (indeed, one character later on will have a brick-sized cell phone). But Harry picks up the receiver anyway.

On the other end of the line is a man claiming to be named Chip. Chip thinks he's called his father tells Harry how sorry he is, and that the missiles have been fired from the silo in North Dakota where Chip is stationed, and that, as a result, Dad only has about 70 mintues until the incoming Soviet missiles hit. Harry naturally figures that this is a prank, and tries to get Chip to admit to this. Eventually, Chip realizes he's dialed the wrong area code, while somebody on Chip's end of the line does something that might possibly be shooting Chip, before that guy gets on the phone to tell Harry to forget everything he heard.

Of course Harry can't forget it. He goes back into the diner, asking the other diners if they have a son named Chip and other questions about things he heard in the phone call. Eventually, one of the diners does recognize something Harry says. That diner is the well-dressed Landa (Denise Crosby, Tasha Yar from the first season of Star Trek: TNG), and she believes Harry has identified some of the launch codes from nuclear missiles! She, being a power player, gets on her cell phone and starts calling people she knows in Washington, only to find that they've supposedly all decamped for Antarctica, which is a sure sign that nuclear war is on the way!

Landa tries to arrange for a helicopter to get the folks in the diner to LAX from where they can fly... somewhere; who knows what part of the world won't be affected by the nuclear war if there really is one. And it's not as if there are any commercial flights to Antarctica. In any case, Landa and the rest of the patrons in the diner get into the cook's catering van for the drive to the nearest helicopter landing pad.

Unfortunately, Harry decides that he can't face the possible end of the world without Julie, so he begs Landa and the cook to make a detour to Julie's apartment. They rather sagely point out there isn't time, so Harry gets out of the van to try to make his way to Julie's place and then, hopefully, to the landing pad before Landa's helicoper takes off. But he's going to have to get through a city where word has begun to filter in about the possibility of a nuclear attack....

After watching Miracle Mile, I read some of the reviews on IMDb, and have to agree with one of them that stated that the first portion of the movie feels like it's going into bad TV Movie of the Week territory. But then Harry gets that phone call, and things start going in completely different directions. Some of the reviewers think this make the movie great, while others argued that the movie as a whole doesn't work at all. It really came across to me as a movie that sharply divdes opinion among the relatively limited segment of people who have actually seen it.

I think I'm actually somewhere in the middle. I can see why people might not like Miracle Mile. There's a whole lot of suspension of disbelief required, with plot holes that I don't think would happen in real life, not that I've ever been anywhere about to be hit by nuclear missiles. On the other hand, the movie feels like an extended-length episode of one of those sci-fi anthology shows of the early 60s like The Twilight Zone. It's always different enough that you don't really know where it's going to go next; unlike, say, Ladybug, Ladybug it's not clear fairly early on whether the alarm is a false alarm or whether something more ominous is going to happen.

So Miracle Mile is definitely an uneven movie. But for me it was one that was more worth watching that it was a miss.