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In the '70's the disaster movie was a very popular genre. Just think about movies such as "Airport", "The Poseidon Adventure", "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno". The '70's were already close to their end at the time of the release of this movie and the genre also already had its best moments clearly behind them. This movie just doesn't seem to realize this and lets all of the typical '70's genre moments feature in this movie.
Like basically every '70's disaster movie, the movie features an all star cast, with in this case actors such as Sean Connery Karl Malden, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard and Henry Fonda involved. Not that it matters much though, since none of the actors exactly have their finest moment in this movie and they can't really make the movie it's silly story more credible.
To be honest the story and its events often don't make much sense and it isn't exactly made more plausible by its special effects, which are just laughable bad. Yes I know it's an 1979 movie but surely better things as featured in this movie were possible, when you look at for instance at movies such as "Star Wars", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "2001: A Space Odyssey", which all got made prior to this movie.
The fact that this movie is done in such an horrible way makes the movie seem the more painfully ridicules and laughable actually.
Strangely enough the movie doesn't focus much on any personal drama, something that normally was featured very prominently in '70's disaster flicks. It makes this movie also a very shallow and uninteresting experience. Why should you care about any of the characters? Why should you care about the fact that the world is about to get destroyed by a meteor in this movie? The movie now just mainly drags on instead all the time.
I liked the musical score from Laurence Rosenthal though. It was a John Williams kind of sounding score. Williams composed for a lot of '70's disaster flicks such as the earlier mentioned "The Poseidon Adventure", "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno". Williams was also actually first set to compose the score for this movie.
I do know now were Michael Bay got some of his inspiration from. A lot of trademark buildings and famous big cities gets hit by meteors and other natural disasters that go with it. But another laughable thing is that the movie is actually using archive footage of buildings getting demolished and it actually uses some footage from another disaster movie which got released only 1 year prior to this movie, called "Avalanche", which by the way also seems like a real horrible movie. Yes, I'm definitely planning on seeing that movie!
Perhaps not as totally horrible as its reputation would suggest but nevertheless still a bad late '70's disaster flick.
4/10
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