I had the chance to see Meteor again on UK Channel 5.

It was loaded with scientific errors, which can be found on the IMDB link to save me repeating them.

In addition

We had a space craft to Mars in something resembling Sky Lab, that somehow has extra fuel for a side trip to the asteroid belt, which I suspect would take more than a day to reach from Mars. (Did not Neil and Buzz only have 15 seconds of fuel left in the Eagle?)

We had sound in space

TV pictures of the missile platforms as they rotate somehow received, from some remote camera that is never seen.

A five mile asteroid is hardly likely to be deflected enough at that close a distance by a few nukes!!!

And from the post nuking shot the scene makes it look like the five mile wide asteroid was totally vaporised without lots of smaller chunks that would pepper the Earth causing worse damage.

Oh and BTW, what happened to this project Icarus that MIT is supposed to have been working on.

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I saw about 2 minutes of the film. The dialogue was bad, too.

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Sean Connery without a Walther PPK or a red nappy.

So why did the superpowers have one platform each? Why put all your nuclear eggs in one basket? How did they stay on target? Were they in geosynchronous orbit? Wouldn't several lower orbiting platforms be able to mass murder people with much less response time? Why were the Americans worried that the Russians might not launch agains the asteroid but might launch against the U.S. instead? Surely the U.S. had more nukes than just those on their orbiting platform? Why did they need to wait so long before launch? How could a United States general be so stupid as to think a five mile wide asteroid would burn up? What this some sort of ruse to make the Soviets think they were really stupid? Why do female translators always look so hot in movies?

I actually saw this movie when it was in the theatres. Fortunately, my father paid for the tickets.

Yeah, not the best asteroid movie ever made, but look at that cast! It was fun just watching them chew the scenery.

Natalie Wood was always worth watching. She was born to Russian parents and Meteor allowed her to use the Russian she had learned as a child.

Oh, and from the IMdB trivia page:
"Some of the background radio chatter in the Hercules control room is taken from recordings of Apollo missions."

So some of the science was entirely correct, if misplaced.

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So does this make Armageddon look like a really good film?

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No. In fact, I was going to point out it was at least better than Armageddon. Despite the flaws, the idea (sending multiple nuclear bombs on space based rockets to deflect an asteroid) made a lot more sense than the nonsense in Armageddon. That doesn't make Meteor a good movie, or (by any stretch of the imagination) technically competent, understand. It just doesn't take much to be better than Armageddon.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Why the Armageddon hate? Next you'll be telling me that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers don't have gatling guns mounted on them like the rovers in Armageddon. Or that NASA doesn't keep a giant sized space suit handy in case they have to send someone the size of the actor Michael Clark Duncan into space.

Well, space suits aren't custom made. They're custom fitted from various sections that come in various sizes into a complete whole. They do that because a complete suit is worth about thirty million dollars. That said, I doubt any suit parts are made to house someone of that girth.

A normal ticket to space costs twenty million, due to the $20,000+ dollars it costs to get a kilogram into low Earth orbit. How much would it cost to send a man who weighs a metric ton out to the moon and back, as is done in the movie?

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I don't remember there being anyone weighing that much...?

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Poor Natalia Zakharenko. What big, gorgeous eyes. Too bad she then had to go and have a Brainstorm.

I saw Meteor when it was first on TV way back when. Made me want to go out and start shooting stars.

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It's been a long time since I've seen this movie, but I remember that if you looked close enough, you can actually see the decals on the orbiting missile platform model beginning to yellow with age.

Jim gets it, totally. From the very apex of the decade that gave the world all four AIRPORT films, the Irwin Allen tour de sort malheureux and the SensSurround celebrity slaughterers(Hello Victoria Principal with an afro!)....METEOR fits quite snugly.

For a true movie buff, any film that has a poster featuring a row of moviestar heads in boxes(and a venerable face as "The President"!) is usually worth the price of admission...which for most folks is free on the teleteat.

Besides, in a few years when objectivity can be gained, the hard-edged films of today will seem just as silly...and just as tacky!

I recommend the great coffee-table book THE STEWARDESS IS FLYING THE PLANE! American Films of the 1970s...it'll put it all in it's proper context.

ps...I'm guessing the name Joe Patroni means nothing to alot of you.

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Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

where's my cigar?!

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Are you a Bright?

In the first one he was some kind of engineer by 80 he was a top notch pilot air ace

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Jim gets it, totally. From the very apex of the decade that gave the world all four AIRPORT films, the Irwin Allen tour de sort malheureux and the SensSurround celebrity slaughterers(Hello Victoria Principal with an afro!)....METEOR fits quite snugly.

I graduated high school in 1975. By almost any reasonable measure, most of the stuff that passed for popular entertainment in that decade sucked as bad as a black hole. METEOR was a horrid movie but just another in a long line back in the day.

...one whose close friends would not hesitate to set him up with the finest prostitutes in Paris.


...including THE BLACK HOLE, right?

Well, I graduated a decade later and can assure you that I can say the same exact thing with equal confidence.

And I'm afraid that long line began much earlier and is proudly carried on to this very day. But I'll take just about anything from the 70s over a SAW or a HOSTEL 2 any day of the week. HOSTEL 2 **sigh** what trash!

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

70's science fiction...I see now why Lucas was a breakout, he never had much competition...

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Christopher Walken did it...but don't tell anyone.

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Astronomy is looking up... :)

Micheal Clark Duncan is a bigtime actor who has landed a lot of big roles. Aparently he is 145 kg, but directors just can't help exagerating his size further and making him look even bigger. He was the giant guy in Green Mile, the giant ape in Planet of the Apes and the giant guy in Armageddon. You can see him at the start of a movie holding a giant wrench. It always made me wonder what sort of company specializes in making handtools that can only be used by giants.

Aint that the truth

Logans Run

Damnation Alley

Rollerball - which I didn't mind that much

Marooned (Yeah 69, but I saw it in 70 lol )

Silent Running

Zardoz

Omega Man (Just can't get my head around that one)

Demond Seed

Invasion of the Body snatches (Would any decade be complete with a remake)

Well the great thing about the films(or rather Finney's story actually) is that the paranoia it engenders is so malleable. It can represent commies, new-age stonerubbers, lock-step martial mindsetters and so on. As this new Nicole Kidman one appears to be pretty awful, perhaps the film can be taken as breaking down the fourth-wall and seen as a philosophical take on the fear of a Hollywood run by alien-engineered clones with only one mindset...and only one screenplay!

Actually I look forward to the next stab at it in 2016. It'll be called 5n47ch3R2 and involve the spreading epidemic of people milling around in a techno-fog. Driving, eating, speaking, reproducing - unable to seperate themselves from their iPhones, iGlasses, iHats, iSlacks....oh, wait!

..wasn't that supposed to be spin-off of SANFORD & SON?
I know...lousy joke!

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

Yo! don't be dissin my favorite MC like this, I won't comment on the Body Snatches!!

Dale in Ala

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One other thing about the film Meteor I believe they also got wrong, was the explosions when the missiles hit. They looked very much like explosions in an atmosphere. Now a five mile wide asteroid is big, but not big enough to retain an atmosphere.

Did somebody ask this question here, what would a nuclear explosion on the Moon look like? What was the answer there?

Also, as a side point, what happened with Project Icarus that they mentioned at the end of the film?

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Just a wild guess, I'd say pretty close to what Deep Impact looked like when the comet ran it over.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

A search for Project Icarus turned this up :

Page one - http://www.thespacereview.com/article/175/1

Pge Two - http://www.thespacereview.com/article/175/2

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"Meteor" wasn't even well-receieved in 1979 when it came out....

"Meteor", "Zardoz" and "Never Say Never Again" were all real low-points in Sean Connery's career (and movies I wished I had never paid full-price to see...)

Still not nearly as bad a David Birney's "Nightfall" (1988)... that still tops my list of "worst movie of all time".

Don't forget Dark Star!

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Ah, yes. I remember him now. I was partly commenting on your exaggeration of his weight, too. Directors do go a bit OTT on this one. In The Green Mile, the van in which he arrived at the prison was portrayed as struggling under his weight (implying that he must have weighed as much as perhaps 6 medium-sized people).

__________________
The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

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