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| Gotta love a movie poster with a typo in the title |
Warner Bros.
June 2, 1978
Action
DVD
B
Peter Hyams wrote and directed this "paranoid but happy-ended" thriller that I enjoyed far more than I expected. To begin with, although I'd heard the title for years (maybe since the time), I had no idea what the movie was about and would've guessed it was about astronauts in flight, which would've been Snoozeville for me. But when David Huddleston started insulting the vice-president (perfectly cast nondescript actor James Karen, who feels like someone you've seen in something, in my case in M*A*S*H's final season) to his face and behind his back, I knew that this was not going to be a simple case of hero worship.* There are heroes in the film, the main astronaut and the crusading reporter (played, as Hyams notes in his commentary, by Barbra Streisand's husbands), but there's also an offbeat sense of humor, where lots of characters are smart-asses. I was most surprised that I genuinely enjoyed the action: car chases, plane chases, vandalizing a Coke machine, etc. The basic premise is ridiculous (to pick just one example, the spacesuits do not look like they'd stand up to a Martian climate), and to be honest, I was inadvertently re-impressed with how Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and even more Big Bus parody the tropes of this era, and yet this is such a fun ride that a B feels right.
*I can't tag either actor since I'd exceed my character limit.
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