Continuing my plan to watch every Sean Connery movie in order, I come to his second movie of 1979 Meteor.Plot In A Paragraph: The USA must join forces with the USSR in order to destroy a gigantic asteroid heading straight for Earth.Meteor isn't so much a disaster movie as it is a disaster. Almost every role is miscast, they are given ridiculous dialogue, the special effects are ropey at best and considering what is at stake, there is a lack of tension. I'm actually bored writing this review.Meteor didn't make a dent at the domestic box office, failing to recoup its $22 million budget.

It looks like they blew the budget on the actors and were forced to compromise with some shoddy, low-budget effects work in this tacky disaster movie which serves as a precursor to DEEP IMPACT which arrived some twenty years later. Sadly, it's a rather dull affair which only picks up in the last half an hour and consists of endless talk and discussions before then. The actors and actresses do their best with the unbelievable dialogue but even they come off looking stilted and bored.It's a shame that this movie is so poor, as the cast is one of those ensemble ones to die for. A fifty year old Sean Connery takes the male lead, and plays his typical character: charming, attractive to the women, and always in command. Yeah, right. Thankfully, the ever-great Karl Malden is around and elevates the film a notch or two, showing Connery the real way to do things. Natalie Wood is the attractive female Russian, but in retrospect her presence is dominated by the viewer's recollection of her tragic death a couple of years later. Brian Keith is amusing as a Russian diplomat, while Martin Landau has the showy role of a stuffy US general forced to disagree with everybody's plans. In smaller roles, Henry Fonda pops up pointlessly as the US president, Trevor Howard is a British contact, and eagle-eyed viewers will spot Eurotrash legend Sybil Danning in a cameo as a skier in Zurich who gets buried under an avalanche.The special effects are amateurish in nature and really have to be seen to be believed. The space effects are obvious matte work and were nothing for George Lucas to worry about. Simple red lights stand in for various shards of meteorite which hit Earth beforehand and cause some minor damage. Whenever there's an explosion, the screen just fills with white so you can't see anything. One effect I did like was of a huge tidal wave coming around a street corner in Hong Kong, but that's the single impressive effort in the entire movie.If the first hour and a quarter is mere small talk and general chit-chat about what to do, then the final half-hour becomes typical disaster fare when events take a different direction, although by then it's too little, too late. The various actors and actresses suffer a shard hitting their complex and are forced to escape through a flooding subway. It's a chance for the guys and girls to get really muddy and actually take part in some action before the ending. As this is a mainstream title, the actual outcome is never once in doubt which makes any tension-building scenes relatively pointless. Worth watching for disaster movie fans; a gigantic bore for just about everyone else.

There is a Meteor on collision course with Earth and if we don't stop it then, well its bye bye for a lot of us! Meteor is a disaster movie that came out in 1979 when the genre was winding down people had, had enough of buildings collapsing, airplanes crashing and boats capsizing which is part of the reason I think this movie has been ridiculed ever since, sure the special effects aren't great and the use of stock footage is a bit cheap but for its time they aren't that bad. The story line is fairly interesting trying to get America and Russia to combine its nuclear weapons to destroy the large rock during the Cold War wouldn't of been easy and the tension between the two groups is well presented. The acting from all involved including Sean Connery (getting shaken but not stirred), Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda and Karl Malden is OK but nothing special and almost tongue in check which is probably the best way to take this film.Before the daddy rock takes aim, we get baby ones coming along for the ride causing snow storms, avalanches, tidal waves and the destruction of New York City, perhaps a few more would of helped things move along quicker.The ending is quite predictable but then we couldn't have the rock destroying us all could we? It is probably drawn out a bit to long and at this point in the film I thought the scenes back on earth with our stars clambering there way through subways was more interesting.So all in all, yes its a bit corny, yes its a bit camp and yes it certainly isn't a great film but on the other hand, it should hold your attention and isn't that bad either, if it had been released a few years earlier when disaster was big business then I do think it would of been a better received film and is at least as good as most other disaster movies from the 1970s.

My big problem with this movie is that there are times when it seems the director wanted to tell the story in real time. The bulk of the viewing audience is very accustomed to the abbreviations in the action in order to keep the pace exciting. It may have been that the director through dragging out some of the sequences would help build suspense. What it really did was to underscore the lack of suspense inherent to the story. Watching the missiles for minutes on end only made this viewer realize just how little I cared by that point. Part of me was rooting for the meteor, for mercy's sake. Given the era, and nearly ten years of riveting disaster movies that went before it, it's inexcusable that this one couldn't keep us on the edges of our seats.