After the asteroid Orpheus in the Asteroid Belt is hit by a comet, dozens of asteroid fragments are sent on a collision course towards Earth, along with a five-mile wide fragment which will cause an extinction-level event. While the United States government engages in political maneuvering, the smaller asteroid fragments preceding the main body wreak havoc on the planet, revealing the threat. The United States has a secret orbitingnuclear missile platform satellite named Hercules, which was designed by Dr. Paul Bradley. It was intended to defend Earth against a threat like Orpheus, but instead was commandeered by the U.S. Armed Forces to become an orbiting weapon now aimed at the Soviet Union. After many calculations, it is determined that the fourteen nuclear missiles on board Hercules are not enough to stop the asteroid.
The United States has known that the Soviet Union also has a similar weapons satellite called Peter the Great in orbit, with its sixteen nuclear warheads pointed down at the United States. Needing the additional firepower to stop Orpheus, the President 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. To coordinate the counter-effort between the two countries, Bradley requests a Soviet scientist named Dr. Alexei Dubov.
Bradley and Harry Sherwood of NASA meet at the control center for Hercules, located beneath 195 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Major General Adlon is the commander of the facility. Dubov and his interpreter Tatiana Donskaya 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 platform.
Meanwhile, more meteorite fragments strike Earth (one inside Siberia), and the Soviets finally agree to join in the effort. Both satellites are coordinated, and turned towards the incoming large asteroid as 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. With hours remaining prior to Orpheus' impact, as planned, Peter the Great's missiles are launched first because of its relative position to the asteroid, with Hercules's missiles timed to be fired 40 minutes later.
Immediately prior to Hercules's missiles being launched, a splinter fragment is discovered to be heading towards the command center in New York City. If the center is destroyed, Hercules will not be able to launch. With seconds to spare, Hercules receives the signal to fire from the command center, and launches its missiles. The splinter impacts the city, destroying the top half of the World Trade Center twin towers in a direct hit, and creating a large crater in Central Park. Several workers inside the control center are killed when the facility is partially destroyed by the collapse of the building above, and the survivors are forced to work their way out of the control center by going through the New York subway system, which becomes a trap due to water from the East River flooding the tunnels. Meanwhile, the two flights of missiles link up into three successively larger waves. The Hercules crew reaches a crowded subway station and waits while others try to dig them out.
Eventually, the missiles reach the meteoroid. 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.
Theodore R. Parvin received the idea for the story from a Saturday Review article by Isaac Asimov about a meteor hitting a major city in the United States. Parvin hired Edmund H. North to write the screenplay, who took further inspiration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project Icarus. However, Ronald Neame and Sean Connery disliked both North's script and a rewrite by Steven Bach, and so hired Stanley Mann to completely re-write the screenplay. This led to a Writers Guild of America dispute over whether North should be credited as a co-writer.[8]
Principal photography took place from October 31, 1977, to January 27, 1978, mainly at MGM Studios in Culver City, California, with some location filming in Washington, D.C., St. Moritz, Switzerland and Hong Kong.[8] The release date was scheduled for June 15, 1979, but it was pushed back to October 19 due to special effects reshoots after special effects director Frank Van der Veer was fired.
Special effects
With most of the special effects budget already expended by Van de Veer (whose work was not usable, and subsequently discarded), William Cruise and Margot Anderson were hired to reshoot all of the special effects for what money remained. They were also fired, and replaced by Paul Kassler and Rob Balack, who were asked to complete the special effects, again, with what money remained in the budget (and just two months before the film's release). In order to complete the film on time, Kassler and Balack re-used footage from the 1978 disaster filmAvalanche, filmed the Hong Kong "tidal wave" scene in an improvised water tank in Los Angeles using cardboard cutouts of buildings, and used 22-inch-long nuclear missile satellite miniatures that were far too small for effective filming.[8]
Prop designer John Zabrucky, who had previously only worked in television, provided props for the film.[11]
Music
The film was originally supposed to receive a score by John Williams, but he left the project.[8]
Reception
Meteor was received poorly by critics. In her New York Times review, Janet Maslin called the film "standard disaster fare", adding that "the suspense is sludgy and the character development nil".[12]Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 1.5 stars out of 4 and wrote, "Let's face it, the bottom line on a disaster film is how special are its special effects. With 'Meteor,' the answer is not very. The big meteor in the picture, hurtling toward Earth at 30,000 miles an hour, looks like something I recently found at the bottom of my refrigerator — green bread."[13]Variety called the acting "uniformly good" but the "principals mostly stand around waiting for the next calamity to happen ... What really matters to audiences for this kind of film, of course, is not the acting, but the visuals, and here, 'Meteor' gets good, but not great, grades."[14]Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "against its own odds, it is—for what it intends to be—uninspired but competent, efficient, commercial and entertaining, with some random moments that are very nice indeed."[15] Judith Martin of The Washington Post called it "your standard 'My God — here it comes!' job, for those that like that sort of thing."[16] John Pym of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "As effects go, and effects rather than surprises (or any real plotline) are what the producers have banked on, Meteor looks decidedly old-fashioned and second-hand."[17] TV Guide writes- "An $18 million, star-studded disaster film, which in itself is a major disaster."[18]
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a rating of 5% based on 19 reviews, with the site's consensus being “Meteor is a flimsy flick with too much boring dialogue and not enough destruction. At least the pinball game is decent.”[19]
Samuel Z. Arkoff called Meteor the most difficult production ever undertaken by American International Pictures due to the high production, special effects, and marketing costs. After the film flopped, the studio was forced to enter negotiations for a buyout from Filmways.[8]
A voiceover at the end of the film mentions "Project Icarus", a report on the concept to use missiles to deflect an earthbound asteroid.[23] The original Project Icarus was a student project at M.I.T. in a systems engineering class led by Professor Paul Sandorff in the Spring 1967.[5] It examined methodologies that could deflect an Apollo asteroid named 1566 Icarus if it was found to be on a collision course with Earth. Time published an article about the research in June 1967.[24] The results of the student reports were published in a book the following year.[5][25]
A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body whose orbit brings it into proximity with Earth. By convention, a Solar System body is a NEO if its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU). If a NEO's orbit crosses the Earth's orbit, and the object is larger than 140 meters (460 ft) across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO). Most known PHOs and NEOs are asteroids, but a small fraction are comets.
The Tunguska event was an approximately 12-megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated East Siberian taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event. The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres in size. The asteroid approached from the east-south-east, and probably with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph). Though it is classified as an impact event, the object is thought to have exploded at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres rather than having hit the surface of the Earth, leaving no impact crater.
Armageddon is a 1998 American science fiction disaster film produced and directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and released by Touchstone Pictures. The film follows a group of blue-collar deep-core drillers sent by NASA to stop a gigantic asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It stars Bruce Willis with Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan and Peter Stormare.
A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are distinguished as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than meteoroids are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust. Most are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars.
An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have physical consequences and have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or meteoroids and have minimal effect. When large objects impact terrestrial planets such as the Earth, there can be significant physical and biospheric consequences, though atmospheres mitigate many surface impacts through atmospheric entry. Impact craters and structures are dominant landforms on many of the Solar System's solid objects and present the strongest empirical evidence for their frequency and scale.
Asteroid impact avoidance comprises the methods by which near-Earth objects (NEO) on a potential collision course with Earth could be diverted away, preventing destructive impact events. An impact by a sufficiently large asteroid or other NEOs would cause, depending on its impact location, massive tsunamis or multiple firestorms, and an impact winter caused by the sunlight-blocking effect of large quantities of pulverized rock dust and other debris placed into the stratosphere. A collision 66 million years ago between the Earth and an object approximately 10 kilometres wide is thought to have produced the Chicxulub crater and triggered the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that is understood by the scientific community to have caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.
A disaster film or disaster movie is a film genre that has an impending or ongoing disaster as its subject and primary plot device. Such disasters may include natural disasters, accidents, military/terrorist attacks or global catastrophes such as a pandemic. A subgenre of action films, these films usually feature some degree of build-up, the disaster itself, and sometimes the aftermath, usually from the point of view of specific individual characters or their families or portraying the survival tactics of different people.
1566 Icarus is a large near-Earth object of the Apollo group and the lowest numbered potentially hazardous asteroid. It has is an extremely eccentric orbit (0.83) and measures approximately 1.4 km (0.87 mi) in diameter. In 1968, it became the first asteroid ever observed by radar. Its orbit brings it closer to the Sun than Mercury and further out than the orbit of Mars, which also makes it a Mercury-, Venus-, and Mars-crossing asteroid. This stony asteroid and relatively fast rotator with a period of 2.27 hours was discovered on 27 June 1949, by German astronomer Walter Baade at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was named after the mythological Icarus.
Ronald Neame CBE, BSC was an English film producer, director, cinematographer, and screenwriter. Beginning his career as a cinematographer, for his work on the British war film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1943) he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects. During a partnership with director David Lean, he produced Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946), and Oliver Twist (1948), receiving two Academy Award nominations for writing.
Asteroid is a 1997 NBC TV miniseries about the United States government trying to prevent an asteroid from colliding with the Earth. The miniseries aired February 16–17, 1997.
The Hammer of God is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke originally published in 1993. Set in the year 2109, it deals with the discovery of an asteroid to be on course to collide with Earth and depicts the mission for deflecting the asteroid by using fusion thermal rockets.
Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie is a 1995 American documentary film directed by Peter Kuran and narrated by William Shatner.
Battle Beyond the Sun is the English-dubbed and re-edited U.S. version of Nebo Zovyot, a 1959 Soviet science fiction film. Roger Corman acquired the Soviet film for US distribution and hired a young film-school student named Francis Ford Coppola to Americanize it. It is still a tale of the "space race", of two nations competing to become the first to land a spacecraft on the planet Mars, but switches the competing nations, via the dubbing, from the USSR and the USA to the fictional future countries of North Hemis and South Hemis. The names of not only the Soviet characters, but also their performers, and the crew credits as well, were altered on the screen to American-sounding names in order to further disguise the film's origins: thus Soviet stars Aleksandr Shvorin and Ivan Pereverzev became "Andy Stewart" and "Edd Perry", and Soviet directors Mikhail Karyukov and Aleksandr Kozyr became "Maurice Kaplin" and "Arthur Corwin" - and were demoted to Assistant Director status as well. The advertising and release print's designated Director is given as Thomas Colchart; sources vary as to whom that name actually belongs.
Impact is a 2009 Canadian action disaster miniseries directed by Mike Rohl, written by Michael Vickerman and distributed by Tandem Communications, starring David James Elliott, Natasha Henstridge, Benjamin Sadler, Steven Culp, James Cromwell and Florentine Lahme as the story shows about a meteor shower which eventually sends the Moon on a collision course with Earth. The two-part mini-series premiered February 14 and 15, 2009 on the Canadian premium television channel Super Channel and was also shown on ABC on June 21 and 28, 2009 and on Alpha TV in September 2011. The mini-series was released to DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Meteor Apocalypse is a 2010 American science fiction film directed by Micho Rutare.
A meteor air burst is a type of air burst in which a meteor explodes after entering a planetary body's atmosphere. This fate leads them to be called fireballs or bolides, with the brightest air bursts known as superbolides. Such meteoroids were originally asteroids and comets of a few to several tens of meters in diameter. This separates them from the much smaller and far more common "shooting stars", that usually burn up quickly upon atmospheric entry.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT. It was caused by an approximately 18 m (59 ft) diameter, 9,100-tonne (10,000-short-ton) near-Earth asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 ± 0.4 degree angle with a speed relative to Earth of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. The light from the meteor was briefly brighter than the Sun, visible as far as 100 km (60 mi) away. It was observed in a wide area of the region and in neighbouring republics. Some eyewitnesses also reported feeling intense heat from the fireball.
Nebo Zovyot is a Soviet science-fiction feature film, produced by Aleksandr Kozyr and Mikhail Karyukov, and filmed at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in 1959.
Collision Earth is a Canadian disaster television film directed by Paul Ziller. It was released in 2011 for broadcast on the Syfy Channel and later distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment on Blu-ray.
↑ Cohen, Jerry; Soble, Ronald L. (July 2, 1978). "'Meteor'--How a Movie Came to Be: HOW 'METEOR' BECAME A MOVIE A Movie Is Born; a Meteor Is the Star A Meteoric Idea Becomes a Movie MOVIE-MAKING". Los Angeles Times. p.a1.
↑ Friedt, Stephan (July 2016). "Marvel at the Movies: The House of Ideas' Hollywood Adaptations of the 1970s and 1980s". Back Issue!. Raleigh, North Carolina: TwoMorrows Publishing (89): 62.
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