Meteor

Plot synopsis:
After the asteroid Orpheus is hit by a comet, a five-mile chunk of Orpheus is sent on a collision course towards Earth, which will cause an extinction-level event. While the United States government engages in political maneuvering, smaller asteroid fragments precede the main body, wreaking havoc on the planet. The United States has a secret orbiting nuclear missile platform satellite named Hercules, which was designed by Dr. Paul Bradley (Sean Connery). It was intended to defend Earth against a massive space rock, but instead was demoted to become an orbiting super weapon now aimed at Russia. However, its fourteen nuclear missiles are not enough to stop the meteor.
The United States discovers that the Soviet Union also has a weapons satellite. The President (Henry Fonda) goes on national television and reveals the existence of Hercules, explaining it was created to meet the threat that Orpheus represents. He also offers the Soviets a chance to save face by announcing they, too, had the same program and their own satellite weapon. Bradley requests a scientist named Dr. Alexei Dubov (Brian Keith) to help him plan a counter-effort against Orpheus.
Bradley and Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden) of NASA meet at the control center for Hercules, located beneath 195 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Major General Adlon (Martin Landau) is the commander of the facility. Dubov and his interpreter Tatiana Donskaya (Natalie Wood), arrive and Bradley gets to work on breaking the ice between them. Since Dubov cannot admit the existence of the Soviet device, he agrees to Bradley's proposal that they work on the "theoretical" application of how a "theoretical" Soviet space platform's weapons would be coordinated with the American ones.
Meanwhile, more meteor fragments strike Earth and the Soviets finally admit that they are willing to join in the effort. It appears that the satellite has a lot in common with Hercules, with sixteen nuclear missiles to be used against a large space rock, but is now an orbiting super weapon aimed at the United States. The satellite is christened Peter the Great, and both satellites are turned towards the asteroid. Unfortunately, smaller fragments continue to strike the planet, causing great damage, including a deadly avalanche in the Swiss Alps and a tsunami which devastates Hong Kong. On Sunday morning, Peter the Great's missiles are launched first because of its relative position to the asteroid. Hercules's missiles are fired 40 minutes later.
Just after Hercules's missiles are launched, New York City is struck by a large fragment, destroying most of the city. Several workers inside the control center are killed when the facility is destroyed, and the survivors slowly work their way out of the control center by going through the New York subway system, which has become a trap due to water from the East River flooding the tunnels. Meanwhile, the two packs of missiles link up into three successively larger waves. The Hercules crew reaches a crowded subway station and waits while others try to dig out.
Eventually, the missiles reach the meteor. The first wave of missiles strikes the rock, causing a small explosion, the second wave follows with a larger blast, and the third wave creates an enormous explosion. When the dust clears, the asteroid appears obliterated. In New York City, the radios broadcast the good news: Orpheus is no longer a danger to Earth. Just then, the subway station occupants are rescued.
Later, at an airport, Dubov, Tatiana, Bradley and others exchange goodbyes before Dubov and Tatiana depart on a plane for the Soviet Union.

Tags: revenge, murder, violence

Review:
but maybe some examples may help: 1) The old "oops - we ran out of gas" routine was used "twice" to advance two different story lines - can you imagine how bad that looked?
miraculously, the cell phone starts ringing.3) A big bad guy named Dwight, who's ready shoot people AND police with terrorist grade weaponry, turns into a puppy dog after the sheriff tells him to "think about it" (which takes him all of 8 seconds).4) Life on earth hinges on the calculations of a 20-something year old girl running around with a laptop.
I counted at one point, in a 30-second clip, they changed the music 4 times for painfully obvious cues: perky music for the teenager--cut to: hopeful music for the family--cut to: dark music for the meteors hurtling to earth--cut to: suspenseful music for the frustrated scientist.
This is quite possibly the worst made for TV movie ever and I'm even throwing in some Lifetime movies to come up with that.Yes it does have a good cast, but GOD, please write some decent dialog for them.
I guess they had to eat up time to split this garbage over 2 nights.Back to the cast: the "big name" actors did an okay job, but the new faces that were featured need to try to have themselves digitally removed if they want to continue with a career.
The asteroid itself, of course, is the main concern (no, despite the title, it's not a meteor)-- life on Earth will end if Dr. Lehman is right and the asteroid cannot be stopped.Dr. Chetwyn (who fired Dr. Lehman because he was a nut) gets a disturbing phone call in the middle of the night.
?Then the miniseries starts wasting time on irrelevant plot lines.Most of the characters have some connection with the small town of Taft, California--and, in fact, except for Central Command, all the action is taking place in Taft by the last 20 minutes.
Not the very end of the miniseries, because there's about five minutes left after the action is all over.Getting off the subject of the meteors and Kassandra, the Det. Stark story might have made a good movie in and of itself.
Plus she's cute.Other good performances come from the actors playing a Mexican truck driver, a border official named Murphy, and an old woman with a rotary phone and a son in the military.Marla Solokoff (as Imogene) is pretty to look at.
I'll bet it looks good on a big screen.The military fires nearly everything they have at just the meteors (but save some for Kassandra!), and that's pretty impressive to watch.
I'm just a sucker for watching the Eiffel Tower fall I guess, which usually happens in movies of this type, although I don't recall it happening here specifically.This movie spent a lot of time focusing on a couple different story lines about various people, and I guess that was OK.Not the best disaster movie, but not the worst.
It shows--absolutely no subtlety or depth, nothing original, cardboard characters, standard disaster-movie format (various soap-operas wrapped around a catastrophe), minimal science and generally speaking, nothing worth recommending.
It gets worse.I don't know how I managed to watch (read: survive) this entire movie, but I strongly suggest you do not try to as well.As a last minute edit, in line with other reviewers, I too believe that the actors made the very best they could of this movie.
The awful and corny story is a crap and the characters are ridiculous, with imbecile scientists, stupid military responsible for the missiles, Michael Rooker performing his usual stereotype and last but not the least, the genius Imogene O'Neil.
People like me that like astronomy, and read a few hours a week or month on the subject, don't really watch films like Meteor for the stellar dialogue or plot twists.
I enjoyed all types of these films from this genre and while Armaggedon might have had bigger stars and better special effects- not to mention a more implausible story line, it was nevertheless entertaining.
There's no acting, no storyline, no character development - just knee-jerk reactions of the cast to the script, apparently written on the back of an envelope while the writer was watching all the other meteor movies he could rent for ideas, squeezed into a half-price video store rental weekend.
If these clowns can't see the splendor in the simple things - the love between a mother and a child, the unending passion a scientist has for his work, the strife and hardship faced by our military men and women the world over - then save your time and don't comment on or watch movies.
I don't know what NBC is playing at or what they're trying to accomplish, but if they keep up with these TV movies, they have to be better written to make it worth putting them on the air.
It's not a mini-series, it's an episode each of three or four different third-rate TV series thrown into a blender.The subplot with the "bad cop" is especially annoying: it feels like we have to hit pause on the main story every few minutes to have an excuse to show psychos with guns.
There's a good guy who's trying to balance dealing with the bad cop and stopping the meteor, but he's pretty marginal to the meteor story line.
They could have deleted some characters and at two story lines and had a better movie.
A cast of (good) actors know to most of us I would guess who inexplicably participated in this major flop.Don't waste your time on this one it is simply worth missing all together as there are not memorable moments or significant scenes to impress anyone.There is too much focus on various people trying their best to push out various emotions, dragging out the movie to a completely unnecessary length.
Books have probably been written about how bad these made-for-TV Earth life in jeopardy disaster movies are.
"Meteor" deserves a special place in at least one of these books.The one nice improvement in made-for-TV Earth life in jeopardy disaster movies is the demise of having know-it-all "Little Wesley's" (see Star Trek: The Next Generation) 12-year-olds be the only ones with the answers to save the world.
Watch the films listed above from the golden age of made-for-TV Earth life in jeopardy disaster movies, and you will see a snotty Little Wesley pushing aside the grown-ups in most all of them.
The writing made an episode of Seinfeld seem like MacBeth.Unless you are a writer and like to study the mistakes of other writers in hopes of learning from them, as I am, then your time would be better spent watching the grass grow than watching this movie.I thought I had seen bad movies before, but "Meteor" set a new standard.Chuck Hustmyre.
While visually and directorially the mini-series is the very meaning of amateurish, there's literally been better effects on the worst of Power Rangers and Disney teen movies/shows, there's nothing interesting, subtle or distinctive about the photography, and the overall look of it is depressingly drab.
Now, I don't expect a disaster movie to have a really good plot, but this takes bad to a whole new level.
For the main characters, anything and everything that can go wrong does go wrong.For some reason they decided to include a corrupt cop who wanted to kill somebody's family, rapists with guns, "bad" US citizens with guns, and various other garbage that has no place in an asteroid movie...
The event with several small meteors which hit some of the Earth's cities is just nothing compared to what awaits the world's humanity.This is my story about this film.
I don't know which is more stupid - me wasting 2 nights watching this crapola or the script writers who must have wrote the plot in protest of their paycut.Take for instance the mainplot involving the little scientist girl, Imogen - she has the vital coordinates to save the planet but before she can make that one simple phone call to end this agonising mini series - the car she is driving runs outta gas, her professor mentor gets a hit and run, she hitches a ride to a Mexican police station which coincidentally is being held up by gunmen who then tries to rape her only to be saved by a meteor,she escapes and is picked up by border patrol but on route to the air force base, the patrol car is run off the road by a runaway truck with no brakes, she grabs the gun but not the cell phone (hellooo?) and then proceeds to walk across the desert trying to hail down cars(no takers for a single white gorgeous girl?), she gets to a grocery who charges her 50bucks for a phonecall, she has $16+pesos and she gets turned away (the same grocers promptly lends the next guy that comes along their jeep!),so she continues walking and ends up at a house with a creepy old lady with a shotgun,but hooray she gets to use her phone.
Screened as a 2 part mini-series and I'll confess I didn't catch part 1, but trust me, it wasn't too hard to pick up on the various story lines half way through.I'm generally a fan of this sort of end of the world, apocalyptic disaster movie, but I really have no idea why this was made or needed to be made, especially given the overall quality of the finished product, predictable, uninspiring, unimaginative and largely uninteresting.
You'd never guess (actually you will, so it's not really a spoiler) that he comes back for round 2.I was just begging for the heavily damaged hospital to collapse and put paid to all the annoying survivors inside, something I don't wish for too often, yet for some reason I just knew they were all going to be fine.Sure it had some moments, like when the pretty scientist girl chances upon the old lady's house, but largely unrelated to the main theme of the whole thing.
The climactic scene at the end can only be described as a fizzer, lacking in anything impressive effects or drama wise.I'm sure some techno gurus will be able to pick more inaccuracies and plot holes in this than any other film of this sort of genre and there seemed to be no shortage of implausibilities, especially nearer the business end.Bad. I'll give it a few stars because some of the cast, the lesser lights at least looked like they were trying, but not really worth it unless there's nothing else on..
The only reason you want to watch this show is because of decent movies on the subject of meteors hitting earth like Armageddon.
Many familiar actors from Back to the future, Stargate, Seinfield,The Walking Dead kept appearing in various roles which I found throughly entertaining as I kept wonder who was going to show up next.Certainly I could poke holes threw some of the science behind the story but I have yet to watch a disaster movie you couldn't do so.
BAD PLOT This is, according to several critics, the worst plot in movies about meteorites: Why do the scientists have to drive from Mexico to the US to give the vital data?
And NBC wonders why they lag behind CBS, ABC, FOX, CW, ION and public access cable TV.The plot is unbelievable...carom shot between a comet and an asteroid sends the asteroid on a collision course towards Earth at 160,000mph with just a few hours or so notice to figure out a way to destroy it...the only person who knows the trajectory of the asteroid (Jim Ignatowski from Taxi if that tells you the quality of character development and casting) gets killed by a hit and run driver on a Mexican highway before he can pass on the crucial trajectory information...(In fact, I am going to have to watch it again, because I am convinced that somehow Christopher Lloyd arranged to have the Delorean just knock him back to the future early enough in the movie so you forget that he was in it)....shoulder fired stinger missiles taking out small meteors moving at 40,000mph....an unbelievably annoying scene interface device in which some type of GPS interfaced moving cursor beeps its way across satellite maps to locate the characters in the next scene...characters who have meteor bulls eye targets on them because they keep surviving near misses as if the meteor had a personal grudge against them...the token redeeming social impact scene where Stacy Keach single handedly reforms an obnoxious gun toting redneck and converts him into a shelter volunteer...and finally an astronomy graduate student who along with her "PANASONIC RUGGEDIZED LAPTOP" (the computer logo was held facing the camera so much that it should have been given co-star billing) overcomes two or three near fatal car accidents (sorry lost count because I did fall asleep in part 2), a near miss hit and run that got Christopher Lloyd, a stereotypical ignorant by the book U.S. border patrol agent who fails to believe she can save the world, an attempted rape by escaped prisoners in a Mexican jail, and a trigger happy Army Emergency Command center who wants to nuke everything that is moving in the sky and yet still manages to overcome all of these distractions and saves the world with only seconds to spare...acting that is so bad that it doesn't even deserve a comment...special effects right out of 1972...and just to add icing to the cake a token crazy murderer that has more lives than Jason, is trying to kill most of the major characters, miraculously ends up wearing a bullet proof vest when somebody finally does have the common sense to shoot him, and just won't go away even after he is captured several times and yet keeps managing to escape from the same LA Police Detective who he is trying to kill (along with his father, daughter and anyone else who makes the mistake of being in a scene with any of them).The only way this movie could have been even worse was if they had made Jason Alexander wear the toupee that he wore in "Shallow Hal" or "Dunston Checks In", but my assumption is that the toupee was too embarrassed to do a third movie with him without some type of PETA disclaimer.
It has every known sub-drama imaginable: Racists, Hit-and-Runs, Murder, Doubting Thomas's, You name it - It's got it.Avoid this movie if you can.The acting is spotty, but what do you expect.The beginning starts off cheesy, like Armagedeon, but it quickly drops.The dialog is very forced, like Star Wars Ep. I.One good thing is that it's got good cinematography.If you do start watching, I suggest a large adult beverage..
I really can't believe that I have been looking forward to watching this miniseries for weeks, it is horrible the worst script I have seen on a primetime show in a long time, perhaps ever.
I like disaster type films and the only reason I started watching it was because of Christopher Lloyd, the actor who played crazy scientist Doc Brown on Back to the Future series.
Some of the other shots were also too cartoonish.Just an FYI, Armageddon and Deep Impact were way better films that at least didn't make me feel stupid watching it.Like I said before, I didn't see the 2nd part yet but judging by other reviewers and my own prediction, everything will turn out just fine.
First off the acting is very, very poor and the best actor in it (Christopher Lloyd) is killed off in the first hour, so the world is left in the hands of a 20 something year old nervous wreck of an assistant which is just not convincing.Secondly there are side story's happening that are also unconvincing such as the hospital blowing up and leaving the main doctor and her son trapped in different parts of it, which takes her 3 hours to realize there is a vent though to the next room.Thirdly there are so many cringe worthy moments in it such as shooting down Meteor's with missiles and the communications dropping out at vital moments.I could go on and on but bottom line do not watch this piece of crap..
Of course, I never go into any SyFy made movie expecting much at all, but even this was definitely bad for a SyFy made for TV film..
The premise is good and most of the acting is enjoyable, but it feels like they tried to shove way too many plot lines into this production.
If they had showed the doctor and her family trying to survive that would've been a good movie.
Joining the girl and the cop story lines, it would've been a good movie.
I also think they over did what the girl had to go through and what the bad cop was able to do.This is a movie to watch if you just want noise while you're doing other things, just for the entertainment but don't try to take it too seriously.
This movie is one I will watch again just because I like it, unless Asteroid is on at the same time..
If you read the continuing paragraphs, I might just save you the time you could have spent watching this entire (for lack of better word) show, as calling it a movie would offend feelings of everyone from Lumieres to Bruce Willis.
And it is plenty bad enough.Well, about 45 minutes from the start, I wished the main character was raped and murdered in the police station, so the entire series would end right there.
I'm usually the guy laughs at bad movies, and they turn out to be good in a different way they were supposed too.
I could go on.Usually when I watch disaster movies like these I think: "Well...
and I never regret watching bad movies.