Meteor (1979)

Meteor (1979)

Dir. Ronald Neame

A disaster movie that doesn't have just an ocean liner or skyscraper under threat, it has the entire world! Even so, it's mostly standard fare, except for an unexpected edge that I won't reveal. It doesn't prevent the script from being predictable, but it does provide a viewer with an interesting angle from which to examine certain events.

Sean Connery is the practical, opinionated and steadfast Scot saving the world from a natural disaster in an ever-decreasing time frame. A solution may exist, but dare they use it? Ooh.

In the process, Sean even manages to build a cultural bridge between the American/Russian divide using his renowned sex-appeal. If he could bottle that he could make enough money to buy all of England and cast it off into the sea.

The recurring cutaways to the approaching meteor, a chunk of jagged rock five miles wide and travelling at 30,000 mph, is made even more ominous by a booming bass line; it's silly but fun. The cutaways to other parts of the world should've had a similar result, but for some reason they were mostly kind of stupid.

I laughed when someone asked "Can anything go wrong?". You damn fool. Of course something will go wrong, there's forty minutes of film left!