Meteor (1979)

You just knew that eventually the disaster movie had to run out of gas.  Well, to be honest, it ran out of gas about five movies ago and Meteor is coasting on fumes.  What comes to this movie are dime store special effects, cue-card dialogue and weary A-list stars just turning up because they need to make a car payment.

Meteor isn’t even good trash, it’s just boring, following the events of a giant rock in space that – we’re told – is five miles wide and will make a crater in the planet big enough to make another Atlantic Ocean.  Working off of that information, the cast which includes Sean Connery, Karl Malden, Natalie Wood, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Henry Fonda, Trevor Howard and Richard Dysart, all of whom sit around in command centers looking way too relaxed for a group of people that know that they’re doomed.

Since the actors are paid to do something, there is a plot afoot here.  It concerns Connery’s Paul Bradley an apparent expert on a missile installation that is positioned in space with the United States government hoping that they can use it to destroy the rock before it rocks us.  He is brought into the situation by government man Harry Sherwood (Malden) who gets the film’s big trailer line: “That meteor is five miles wide and it’s definitely gonna hit us!”  The advertisers made good use of that scene.

Meteor is more fun to talk about than it is to watch.  This is a dull, drab, dreary film.  It’s boring even on the level of a so-good-its-bad movie.  Maybe because after Hurricane and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Concorde, this kind of bottom of the barrel disaster picture had worn out its welcome.  It was a joke but the joke got stale.