Meteor (1979) on Netflix
A comet strikes the asteroid Orpheus and sends a five-mile-wide fragment toward Earth. NASA's Dr. Paul Bradley has an orbiting missile platform, but its warheads are too few to stop the rock.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.1/109,613 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes5%
Trailer
Plot summary
Fragments of the asteroid Orpheus are knocked loose when a comet hits it, and the largest, five miles across, is on a course for Earth. While the government debates, smaller pieces strike the planet and show what is coming. America's answer is Hercules, a missile platform in orbit that Dr. Paul Bradley designed to defend against such a threat but that the armed forces turned into a weapon aimed at the Soviet Union. Its fourteen warheads prove insufficient. The Soviets have their own platform, Peter the Great, with sixteen. The President speaks on television, disclosing Hercules and inviting a matching Soviet announcement. Bradley asks for the Soviet scientist Dr. Alexei Dubov, who arrives with his interpreter, Tatiana Donskaya, to coordinate the two satellites.
Cast
- Katherine De Hetreas Jan Watkins
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Meteor (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The special effects were finished in a scramble by Gene Warren Jr., Robert Blalack and Paul Kassler, hired to reshoot and complete them on the remaining budget two months before release. They reused footage from the 1978 disaster film Avalanche and shot the Hong Kong "tidal wave" in a Los Angeles water tank using cardboard cutouts of buildings.
- Ten actors, among them Alec Guinness, Yul Brynner, Rod Steiger, Peter Ustinov, Richard Burton and Orson Welles, were considered for the role of Dr. Dubov. Donald Pleasence was cast and filmed a few scenes before departing to work on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
- The film's Project Icarus had a real original: a student project in a systems engineering class at M.I.T. led by Professor Paul Sandorff in spring 1967, which examined how to deflect the Apollo asteroid 1566 Icarus if it were found on a collision course with Earth.
- Samuel Z. Arkoff called Meteor the most difficult production ever undertaken by American International Pictures, because of the high production, special effects and marketing costs. After the film flopped, the studio was forced into negotiations for a buyout from Filmways.
- Theodore R. Parvin got the idea from a Saturday Review article by Isaac Asimov about a meteor hitting a major American city. Ronald Neame and Sean Connery disliked both Edmund H. North's screenplay and a rewrite by Steven Bach, so Stanley Mann re-wrote it completely, prompting a Writers Guild dispute over North's credit.
- Brian Keith, who had been cast as General Adlon, took over the role of Dr. Dubov instead, one reason being that he could speak fluent Russian, and Martin Landau replaced Keith as Adlon.
