(Recorded) Movie Thoughts: Countdown
Jul. 25th, 2019 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe science fiction movies month on Turner Classic Movies devoted one Tuesday evening to “moon movies,” appropriate enough given Apollo 11’s anniversary. I’d already seen Destination Moon and For All Mankind, but the other drama sandwiching the documentary was one I hadn’t got to yet for all that I had recorded it to DVD from the channel before. Having just watched an early “rocket to the moon” movie, I thought it would be interesting to get to one released just before the actual event, even as I contemplated how Marooned had a minor presence in the histories of science fiction movies I’ve read but I hadn’t been aware of Countdown until I’d happened on it on TCM.
Countdown might have been an edge case between “science fiction” and a mere “technothriller”; it invokes the Soviets sending a man around the moon first even as astronauts are in a simulator with an “Apollo 3” callsign, whereupon the United States activates a secret project to land a Gemini capsule on the moon and keep sending supplies to the lone man in it until an actual Apollo mission can make it there. It also just so happens the Soviets appear to have established they’ll be sending civilians to the moon, so the astronaut hoping to go (played by Robert Duvall, who would play an older astronaut three decades later in Deep Impact) has to prepare another astronaut (played by James Caan) on short notice.
Recent “Space Race” movies and series reach back to recreate the past (at the possible risk of easily provoked troublemakers throwing tantrums over “modern sensibility filters”); I was at least interested in the thought of Countdown being embedded in its time. It did seem to try and present astronauts as somewhere between the “all-American heroes” and the “programmed cogs in the machine” later insinuations suggested conventional wisdom swung between, and there was a certain verisimilitude to the machinery and work settings to my eyes (although a “moon suit” being a hood, overcoat, and snow pants over a Gemini-type space suit I could imagine looking odd to some for all that I have an understanding there’d been plans for something like that). I suppose bringing up these technical details most of all might betray some missing bit of engagement to the story; I was tempted to think the spaceflight scenes suffered for not using even unrealistic special effects for all that on going back to the TCM article I saw that had been a deliberate decision by director Robert Altman.
This has just about brought me to the end of the science fiction movies on TCM, though. I was checking their schedule again when I realised Star Wars: A New Hope was only being shown in the United States; up here THX 1138 is being scheduled instead, which is appropriate enough and does seem more interesting than any of the “Star Wars knockoffs” of the late 1970s. Even so, I went ahead and called up my cable company to see about cancelling the cable I’m not watching very much of any more. As I’d expected, they offered me a deal on a high-definition converter, and I decided I’d try that out even wondering if I’d still be able to time-shift programs. However, it seems part of the deal is getting a much smaller selection of channels, which tempts me to try again to cancel everything.
Countdown might have been an edge case between “science fiction” and a mere “technothriller”; it invokes the Soviets sending a man around the moon first even as astronauts are in a simulator with an “Apollo 3” callsign, whereupon the United States activates a secret project to land a Gemini capsule on the moon and keep sending supplies to the lone man in it until an actual Apollo mission can make it there. It also just so happens the Soviets appear to have established they’ll be sending civilians to the moon, so the astronaut hoping to go (played by Robert Duvall, who would play an older astronaut three decades later in Deep Impact) has to prepare another astronaut (played by James Caan) on short notice.
Recent “Space Race” movies and series reach back to recreate the past (at the possible risk of easily provoked troublemakers throwing tantrums over “modern sensibility filters”); I was at least interested in the thought of Countdown being embedded in its time. It did seem to try and present astronauts as somewhere between the “all-American heroes” and the “programmed cogs in the machine” later insinuations suggested conventional wisdom swung between, and there was a certain verisimilitude to the machinery and work settings to my eyes (although a “moon suit” being a hood, overcoat, and snow pants over a Gemini-type space suit I could imagine looking odd to some for all that I have an understanding there’d been plans for something like that). I suppose bringing up these technical details most of all might betray some missing bit of engagement to the story; I was tempted to think the spaceflight scenes suffered for not using even unrealistic special effects for all that on going back to the TCM article I saw that had been a deliberate decision by director Robert Altman.
This has just about brought me to the end of the science fiction movies on TCM, though. I was checking their schedule again when I realised Star Wars: A New Hope was only being shown in the United States; up here THX 1138 is being scheduled instead, which is appropriate enough and does seem more interesting than any of the “Star Wars knockoffs” of the late 1970s. Even so, I went ahead and called up my cable company to see about cancelling the cable I’m not watching very much of any more. As I’d expected, they offered me a deal on a high-definition converter, and I decided I’d try that out even wondering if I’d still be able to time-shift programs. However, it seems part of the deal is getting a much smaller selection of channels, which tempts me to try again to cancel everything.