First Blog and Marooned Review, Part 1

I'm a big fan of movies, TV and video games and love to talk about all of these things with my mother and brother, but it's time to spread the word to other people. The easy thing to do is to write a little bit of everything I watch or play. The first time I'll write about is a movie from 1969 that won an Academy Award for Special Effects but 44 years later, it's lot a lot of its luster and was the subject of a classic cult series in the 1990's. My review of Marooned will be first up.

Credit: Wikipedia

When I first saw this picture on MST3K, I admit I wasn't overly impressed with it. Looking at it now, it may have been because I didn't think MST did a great job with it. Too many Gregory Peck and David Janssen imitations and too much of the movie was cut for time. A couple months later, TNT showed the film and I recorded it and watched it very carefully, since NASA is another little hobby of mine (thanks to my ADD, I have tons of them, BTW).

There were several things that kind of confused me about the film. This movie strove to be very realistic. Looking on Wikipedia now, I saw that the budget was between $8 and $10 million. I don't know how much that is in 2013 money, but I would guess maybe $150 million. They hired Philco-Ford to build a replica of Mission Control, used a "Block 1" Apollo Capsule (one that was similar to the capsule used during the Apollo 1 test that caught fire and killed three astronauts in 1967) for Ironman One, the Apollo capsule being used to go to an American Space Station (it was never given a name in the movie, NASA would launch Skylab four years later).

This movie was directed by John Sturges, director of several great action films, The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, produced by Frank Capra Jr. (originally Frank Capra Sr., who last directed a film in 1961 considered directing the film himself) and was released in November 1969, after the first men walked on the moon and in time for Oscar season.

So why is this film now as good as it should be? I'll explain in detail soon.