Steve
Sunday 9 December 2012
Marooned (1969)
I was talking to a friends about Countdown (1968) yesterday and after a few minutes we realised he was thinking about another film. Although he was fairly sure it was called countdown too. We talked the plot through and after a while we reckoned it must be this one.
Marooned is perhaps the better known of the two and has if not a similar plot then at least a shared technological peril. Three American astronauts are stranded in space when their retros won't fire. Can they be rescued before their oxygen runs out is the gist of it all.
It's another cautionary tale about the space race, with a countdown to disaster, a lot of melodrama from an equally stunning cast and of course the Russians put an appearance into the proceedings as well.
I absolutely remember watching this one.
Steve
Steve
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Thanks for the flashback! I can remember watching this one on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid and obsessed with becoming an astronaut. I always thought it was odd that the Americans wore red helmets.
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to know there was a whole tribe of us all getting programmed with the same dreams at the same time
ReplyDeleteApologies if I post this twice.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the red helmets are an odd choice; neither authentic, nor helping us to tell characters apart.
I guess the Russian wore a white helmet, so there's that. Why he's apparently flying a Vostok (Vostok / Voskhod couldn't rendezvous in space) and not a Soyuz can be left as an exercise for the reader.
A curious thing is the similarities between this film and the deservedly-forgotten juvenile novel "Mike MARS Flies the Dyna-Soar", where an astronaut takes an experimental spaceplane to rescue an astronaut stuck in orbit. A hurricane makes an appearance as well, except instead of launching through the eye, a Mercury capsule is landed in one.
I adored this movie when I was 11 and it premiered. SO authentic, I thought. Then as an adult, I revisited Marooned (granted, through the cynical eyes of MST3K), and realized that if they left the Skylab (Saturn Workshop) early to set up the plot, it would have months of oxygen for them. And if their SM engine couldn't fire, they had to be still close to the Skylab! And launching David Jansen in the Pepto-Bismol bottle, with or without the storm's eye, would just put one more astronaut in death's path -- which is why NASA has a policy or no rescue missions. I must admit I still die laughing when I recall the MST3K robots watching a dying Richard Crenna as Jim Pruitt floating away and, in their Walter Brennan voice, saying, "Ehhh, Luke McCoy, you come back heah" My pieties for Marooned vanished, as I realized I was no kid anymore.
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