I missed this movie until late last night. It was well received in it's day, but it is a film to be endured. The director's premise is excellent. In fact it's so compelling that you'll stick with it to see how it ends, even though you'll have welts on your head from banging yourself with the TV remote because of the writing. Oh, the director also wrote it. Bet he didn't tell his all-star cast that unimportant little detail before signing. My patience with the writing blew at the early scene where Hal Holbrook "explains" to the astronauts why they were yanked away at the last second. (Have patience, he'll eventually get around to it once he remembers why he's there.) What a meandering monologue -- and the astronauts just sit there like glasses of Tang, stoic and unemotional despite their entire lives seemingly turned upside down. It also doesn't help that the secure facility in which they are confined to work for the next nine months has almost no occupants but themselves. And by confined I mean a single locked door.
It has all the special effects of a Mannix episode except for being amply graced with tons of props and locations courtesy of NASA - the only reason you'll keep giving the movie until the next commercial. But that helicopter chase scene? The only fire being unleased by these two rocket-armed attack helicopters was by somebody leaning out the window with a firearm. Plus they exhibited no strategy but to unrealistically follow the biplane in close single file. At one point one helicopter hovers over the biplane and bangs on its wing several times. Excuse me, but if you couldn't hit the biplane from a couple hundred feet back, ever think of shooting the pilot now that he's six feet away in an open cockpit? But I digress because that still wasn't the most insulting part of the movie.
The worst part was the final scene in the cemetery. Imagine Star Wars rewritten to have Luke shoot his torpedoes at the Death Star in slow motion and then pause at a still of them entering the Death Star's ports, and then...roll credits. THAT, or the equivalent, is how this movie ends. Don't let the clock read 1:30 a.m. Like it did for me when that "great premise" (remember that?) culminates. You will regret it.
It has all the special effects of a Mannix episode except for being amply graced with tons of props and locations courtesy of NASA - the only reason you'll keep giving the movie until the next commercial. But that helicopter chase scene? The only fire being unleased by these two rocket-armed attack helicopters was by somebody leaning out the window with a firearm. Plus they exhibited no strategy but to unrealistically follow the biplane in close single file. At one point one helicopter hovers over the biplane and bangs on its wing several times. Excuse me, but if you couldn't hit the biplane from a couple hundred feet back, ever think of shooting the pilot now that he's six feet away in an open cockpit? But I digress because that still wasn't the most insulting part of the movie.
The worst part was the final scene in the cemetery. Imagine Star Wars rewritten to have Luke shoot his torpedoes at the Death Star in slow motion and then pause at a still of them entering the Death Star's ports, and then...roll credits. THAT, or the equivalent, is how this movie ends. Don't let the clock read 1:30 a.m. Like it did for me when that "great premise" (remember that?) culminates. You will regret it.