Sam Panico Meteor was a BIG deal when released — tie-in toys, a pinball machine, a Marvel comic book — everything that a major 70s blockbuster needed. Some blame American-International Pictures name being on this as a reason for its failure, as people instantly expected cheese from AIP. Some blame the completely boring script. Others just think that everyone was sick of disaster films, as the 70s themselves were pretty much a disaster.Nevertheless, Meteor is competently directed by Ronald Neame, who also helmed The Poseidon Adventure. But the characters never get much to do other than have a few minutes of development and then try and survive.Read more at bandsaboutmovies.com/2017/06/30/meteor-1979/

utgard14 Americans and Russians must put aside their differences to fight meteors. Mediocre disaster flick with the obligatory "all-star cast" these things tended to have. Most of the cast, which includes big stars like Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Karl Malden, and Natalie Wood, only marginally embarrass themselves. They can't do much with the poor script. The worst performance in the film comes from Martin Landau, who is so ridiculously hammy in this I'm surprised he ever worked again. The best performance is that of Brian Keith, who's very amusing as the Soviet scientist Dr. Dubov. The special effects are laughably bad at times. I could live with that if the rest of the movie weren't so damned boring. That's Meteor's biggest fault - it takes what should be an exciting, nail-biting premise and turns it into an uninvolving Cold War melodrama. To be clear, I don't hate disaster movies. There were a lot of entertaining movies of this type made in the '70s, when this fad was at its height of popularity. Unfortunately, Meteor isn't one of them.

StuOz A meteor is about to hit earth.Not to be confused with Irwin Allen's City Beneath The Sea (1971), another disaster movie about a giant rock that is about to hit the earth.The director of Meteor, Ronald Neame, also directed The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and you can hear the guy talk for nearly two hours on the DVD commentary for The Poseidon Adventure. He comes over as a guy who knows his stuff and for this reason you have to wonder what went wrong when he directed Meteor?I am not saying that Meteor is bad, far from it, in fact I would rather watch this than a few of the disaster films that came out in the 1990s (Twister, Deep Impact). The wonderfully dated special effects (no CGI, great!) steal this film and it is fun seeing Karl Malden do two disaster movies in one year (he was also in Beyond The Poseidon Advenure in 1979).In a nutshell: Meteor is okay.

johnp46260 This movie is, above all, an egregious waste of a world-class cast. Did the producers spend all of their money hiring the cast and have nothing left with which to build a decent vehicle for them? That seems to be the only explanation. Everything about 'Meteor' is cheesy: the dialogue, the 'special' effects, the plot, the direction, the music, the editing. Most of the actors look as if they are sleepwalking through their scenes; as if their awareness that they are participating in cinematic malpractice is creating an apathetic milieu. The only bright spot is Brian Keith, who speaks all of his lines in very convincing Russian. He must have worked very hard to pull that off. Natalie Wood also converses in Russian, but this was almost her native tongue, so it comes naturally to her.SPOILER: Very little in 'Meteor' makes sense. Missiles launch in slow motion; people run downhill to escape a tsunami; scientists say that all of the missiles MUST arrive simultaneously in order to have the desired effect, but success is achieved when they arrive at separate times; the subway floods at the end because of 'the river'(?) but more likely because the producers wanted to add another element of danger and a few more minutes to the running time.All in all, 'Meteor' is a total waste. It is only memorable as a small monument to ineptitude.