User reviews

I just rented this on VHS recently. After watching it, I remember that I had seen it many years ago. It was so long ago that I didn't remember details.

I actually liked it. The movie is rather dry, but I actually found it a refreshing change from movies that will throw in all sorts of irrelevant extras to make it an "excitement fest".

Apollo 13 did do a much better job of showing how Mission control worked in a crisis, but Marooned was made before the Apollo 13 mission took place.

Perhaps this movie is slow-moving like some have pointed out, though I didn't mind its deliberate pacing. In fact, I think it's a heck of a lot better than its current IMDb score would indicate.

The film is a near-future sci-fi film in which a group of three astronauts are on a lengthy mission on a space station. On their return to Earth, there is an equipment malfunction and they are stranded in space. Unfortunately, there just doesn't appear to be a way to save them in time so the folks at NASA and on board the ship realize it's just a matter of time before they run out of oxygen.

As far as the acting goes, this was not one of Gregory Peck's finest moments. His character is very, very subdued and stern--too stern. As a result, he comes off as a grouch and a non-emotive one to boot. Fortunately, the astronauts (Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman and James Franciscus) all do an exceptional job and tend to give the film a lot more feeling. In particular, Franciscus is very good and manages to overshadow his more famous co-stars.

Other than Peck, the only other negative are some of the special effects. Most look very good for 1969, but the ones in 2001 seem to be a bit better. The film did get the Oscar for Best Special Effects, however, despite a few less than stellar scenes--though most the film's special effects were very effectively done.

As for the ending, it was very tense and worth seeing. So, for people who like this sort of film, it is excellent and gives insight into the fears people had during the days of the Apollo program.

This creepingly slow space drama was mainly conceived, I'd posit, as a showcase for the acting talents of the four leads: we're treated to Hackman, Crenna and Franciscus playing the astronaut trio trapped in space, and Peck as the no-nonsense controller back on the ground whose attempts to return them to Earth make up the bulk of the running time.

Sadly, 'bulk' is right when it comes to this movie: it's way overlong, with much of the length consisting of repetitive dialogue sequences or scenes which add little to the narrative. In some cases, it actually feels quite stodgy, especially during the lengthy mid section. I was often looking at the clock and wondering how much more of this I could sit through.

Invariably, the special effects are quite dated and often look laughable in this day and age. Yet despite these detractions, the film does have a special kind of timeliness to it (considering the year it was made) which adds significance to the production. And I'll admit that things do get quite thrilling in the last half hour, when we're treated to the kind of suspense that should have been present all the way through.

The actors are the main reason to tune in these days: it's hard to fault any of them, but I think Crenna gives the best performance of the lot as a compassionate family man. Hackman is almost unrecognisable in comparison to the later tough, mannered character actor he became, and as always Franciscus seems to me to be underrated. Peck is very good too, but then that's a given.

John Sturges' Marooned, based on the Martin Caidin novel, tells the story of three Apollo astronauts trapped in orbit when their main engine fails to fire, and the slow, agonizing realization that there's pretty much nothing that can be done for them.

Unless.

It's a slow movie, with Sturges taking his time (or his sweet time if you have no patience for this stuff) to build suspense and tension. Miles of film is expended detailing the boys at Mission Control and Kennedy trying to implement the "unless" I mentioned, a bold rescue mission that will arrive in the last moments of their O2, lifting off into the teeth of a hurricane, no less.

What makes the movie work are the very things that were lampooned so accurately by the boys at Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the terse acronym-filled jargon, the performances by Peck, Janssen, Crenna, Hackman, and Franciscus, and the glaringly non-CGI special effects (that looked great in 1970).

For a space-happy 11 year old, this was the ne plus ultra of movies--and the fact that the boys on the Apollo 13 had recently gotten back alive made Marooned more than a leetle beet unnerving in its topicality.

There's a moment that the movie transcends a clinical yawner, and takes on the mantle of heartbreakingly human drama. When the astronauts' wives are brought in to talk to them on small TV monitors, one after the other, and Nancy Kovack coldly tells the NASA suit "I know why we're here--we're here to say goodbye to them," you feel sucker-punched. It didn't seem real until right then.

Then the wives are warned that their husbands are "degraded," meaning they're tired, cold, and scared beyond description. Richard Crenna and Lee Grant have a touching exchange, the commander and his tough, beautiful, middle-aged wife trying to say everything to each other except goodbye. Kovack struggles with James Franciscus because her husband is the Spock of this mission, clinical and scientific. Yet he angrily assures her that they will make it. You can see him expending every bit of energy to convince her and himself that he's not a dead man orbiting.

Finally, Mariette Hartley tries to comfort Gene Hackman, who is bordering on hysteria and panic. She watches in a gut-wrenching horror as he reacts to her reading a letter the wives have written to the President. He cries and rages something like "I broke the lawn-mower, and I can't fix it and everyone is blaming me for it!" Hartley is hustled away, but she stops in dumb horror as she sees her husband on the big monitor in flight control, screaming "Don't kill me!" as Crenna and Franciscus hold him down to shoot him full of sedatives.

It's the most painful and human moment of the movie. Sturges has kept you on the edge of boredom, then wham, it's somehow all real. The movie goes from intellect to emotion in a matter of a few moments. I didn't appreciate this as an a tweenager, but God how my mouth went dry watching it a few days ago. These poor bastards are already in their titanium-shielded coffin!

The rest of the movie is predictable, but brutal in its denouement. You know that, if the men are to be saved, there's going to be some dues paid. I remember seeing Marooned at the Garland Theatre in Spokane in May, 1970. When those dues were paid, my mom was tearing up.

I thought, typical for a woman.

I was clearing my throat a lot and having trouble focusing on the screen when my family and I watched it over the weekend.

Adulthood has its upside, I guess.

Astronauts Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman, and James Franciscus are on a several month mission in outer space. It's scheduled for seven months, but NASA Director Gregory Peck decides to bring them home early as they are showing signs of fatigue.

But something goes terribly wrong with the reentry rockets and the guys are stranded up there in space with about a 42 hour supply of oxygen. It's looking pretty grim because we're not sure that a rescue mission is feasible. Chief astronaut David Janssen and Gregory Peck lock horns on this issue at a staff meeting. Add to that a hurricane is developing in Caribbean that will be passing over Florida and Cape Kennedy.

But they try and Marooned is about that attempt. As a film it doesn't get too much into character development except during a sequence when the astronaut wives, Lee Grant, Nancy Kovack, and Mariette Hartley are brought in to boost morale all around. It does concentrate on the rescue mission and the special effects for which Marooned got an Academy Award in 1969.

I'm not a science buff by any means, but Marooned was projected several years into the future, the long missions that Crenna, Hackman, and Franciscus were on were years away. But Marooned seemed to get the future right.

It's a dated film now, but still exciting and suspenseful.

A "fictional documentary" seems to have been what they intended and indeed what they got. It's pretty boring though, even if you're from this era. It also looks so realistic that when they try to be dramatic, it often comes across as extremely fake, despite having excellent actors.

The movie also seems nearly pointless after the Apollo 13 film, which dealt with a very dramatic and very real situation. And, curiously, this was released after the first two actual manned moon landings.

The film is strikingly gorgeous, however, with a luxurious level of detail that's constantly visible. It may well be worth watching just to appreciate that. The fx are mostly fantastic, although some important bits near the end unfortunately look really bad.

It just occurred to me, the movie is almost, and ironically, like a very good looking movie star that acts stiff as a board.

Though, the Earth looks very strange, very green and gray, and this is rather distracting because there's a LOT of it. I presume they simply didn't have enough real quality photos of the Earth from orbit to know what it really looks like, and 2001: A Space Odyssey also has an odd looking Earth. I think it's way worse here, though. In 2001, it just looks too washed out, like maybe way too much cloud cover. Also, 2001 took place in the then 30 year future, perhaps depicting an expected different Earth atmosphere.

Stanley Kubrick famously tried to buy insurance for 2001 in case aliens were discovered before its release, ruining the films impact. Seems like this production should have tried something similar. It's really curious why they thought this would work in the middle of the real thing, which was dramatic as life gets. 2001 had a vastly broader story, with (probable) alien life and realistic space travel as merely a mundane backdrop.

As other reviewers have noted, this movie is all but forgotten for these reasons. I'm old enough and like sci-fi enough, I should have seen this decades ago, and yet never even heard of it until it showed up as a Prime recommendation.

The film is just mind numbingly slow and boring. Yes, that's "realistic". When astronauts and NASA are doing a mission, they are not bored because they are doing a job with the astronauts in a high risk environment. But for most viewers, watching endless footage of a mission is like watching paint dry, and that's how this movie is for very long sequences. Did we really need to see them launch?

You could make a twelve hour movie of a 747 flying across the Pacific, with all the details, but would you want to watch that? That's "realistic" too.

A tense thriller and extremely realistic space movie at the time its realization , dealing with three astronauts go in the rocket : Jim Pruett (Richard Crenna), Clayton Stone (James Franciscus) and Buzz Lloyd (Gene Hackman). Back at base, Charles Keith (Gregory Peck) wonders if after eight months in space they could perform the easiest manual tasks. It seems to be a "routine" flight , but things go very wrong, and prospects of a safe return fade . Once in space the astronauts take off their helmets they lose backup for some reason. The mission Director (George Gaynes) decides that they need to use the primary thrust, because the secondary is damaged. The communications officer hears mishaps , retro-fires don't work ; as the NASA mission has an accident in the aircraft . Then , the workers at NASA, try to figure out a way to get the astronauts home safely. Subsequent tensions within the crew and numerous technical problems threaten both the astronauts' survival and their safe return to Earth. Only 55 minutes left to rescue them. While the whole world watches and waits...especially their three wives (Lee Grant , Nancy Kovack , Mariette Hartley) . Houston, we have a problem.

A descriptive film about space mission with 3 marooned astronauts which had the misfortune to go out on release at precisely the time when the astronauts of Apollo 13 were fighting with an exactly similar emergency . Faced with real-life competition , the movie failed at box office due to its overlong runtime , slow-moving and was undeservedly buried ; however , nowadays is better deemed than when it was released . The plot is plain and simple , bearing remarkable and striking resemblance to subsequent Apollo 13 (1995) by Ron Howard , as three brave astronauts : Richard Crenna , James Franciscus , Gene Hackman , stranded 205,000 miles from Earth in a crippled spacecraft when its retro-rockets misfire , as they fight a desperate battle to survive , unable to go back to Earth , meanwhile , at Mission Control, astronaut David Janssen , flight director Gregory Peck and a heroic ground crew race against time and the odds to bring them home. The picture packs tension , intrigue , chills and the suspense builds remorselessly to a neat conclusion . This is a story of sacrifice , averted tragedy , comradeship , heroism and describes a will of creativity and effort on the technicians who ran the early space missions . The wide-screen are first-rate , as well as the special effects that are the main thing this Sci-Fi picture has going for it . Several dollars' worth of Hollywood top-drawer cast is partially wasted in this flick of three astronauts unable to return to Earth .

The motion picture was professionally directed by John Sturges, though with no much enthusiasm , and including some moments amazingly inept ; however , winning Oscar for Special Effects , FX, that are really fabulous . Sturges began his directing career at Columbia Pictures, from there he moved on to MGM where he filmed more "B" pictures, albeit on a larger budget . He established an independent production company in 1959, releasing through United Artists. From 1960-67 he worked under contract for United Artists. His first major hit was the western Dog Day at Black Rock (1955) , which he shot in just three weeks, wrapping up virtually every scene in a single take . He specialized in robust action pictures, particularly westerns. He excelled at bringing to life tautly written stories about tough characters facing difficult circumstances . Throughout his career he regularly alternated hits with misses . He has also been criticized for his lack of stylistic trademarks , though his best films remain exciting to watch . Sturges was expert on all kind of genres , but especially warlike such as : ¨Great Escape¨, ¨Ice Station Zebra¨ and ¨Eagle has landed¨ and Western such as ¨Last train of Gun Hill¨, ¨Magnificent Seven¨, ¨Backlash¨, ¨Law and Jake Webb¨, ¨Joe Kidd¨ and Chino¨, among others . Rating : 6/10 . Passable and acceptable , but a little bit boring and tiring . Well worth seeing .

for whatever reason,Marooned just didn't do a heck of a lot for me.i found it a b it too slow going,and too melodramatic at times.that's not to say it's a poorly made film.on the contrary,it's well done for the most part.the acting is believable from all involved.and the premise is one that should be gripping:three astronauts end up stuck in space,while their oxygen runs low.but for some reason it failed too engage me on a more than moderate level.the only thing i can think of is the dialogue,which was sometimes a bit hokey,in my opinion.still,this is just one person's opinion.but for me,Marooned is a 4/10

Marooned is the story of three astronauts (Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman, James Franciscus) who are stranded in space after a mechanical problem prevents their return. It's then up to NASA, in particular Gregory Peck and David Janssen, to get a rescue mission up within 42 hours before their air runs out. Marooned is not without problems but it's a good movie. Its faults are mainly that the pace is slow and the special effects in the space walk sequences are not the best. Other than that, I don't get the griping. Despite the pace I never felt bored. Most of the performances are good. Gregory Peck is a little too rigid but everybody else is fine.

A butchered version of the movie (called Space Travelers) was featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. As I have seen far too often on IMDb, movies that were featured on that show have been deliberately rated low by some of the show's more unpleasant fans. So please take that into account when viewing the rating given here. I'm actually surprised it's as high as it is. It's too good of a movie to have been on that show but this isn't the first time I've seen a good movie with a terrible IMDb rating simply because it was featured on MST3K.

Listless space-opera from Columbia Pictures (overseen by Columbia's main resident for lushly-produced soapers, M.J. Frankovich) concerns three astronauts working in space on-board the Ironman One, only to encounter immediate troubles with the engine which the folks back in Houston can't seem to rectify. The film, a December 1969 release, predated the real-life Apollo 13 scare (and won an Oscar for its effects), but it's a wheeze. The marooned astronauts start to come apart emotionally, and it's meant to be high drama when Gene Hackman finally freaks out, but all we in the audience can think is, "Didn't these men get the necessary training for this type of disaster?"... and when 'over the hill' Richard Crenna starts musing about his by-gone glory days, you can set your watch for his ultimate fate. "Marooned" is somber, laughably ominous and ultimately pneumatic. *1/2 from ****

I found this movie while I was searching through all the new movies on OnDemand. I usually look through the new movies about once a week, searching for some hidden gem I've never heard of. I'm not always successful, but this time I was.

I'm a pretty big sci-fi fan and especially love "speculative fiction;" meaning content about the near future that isn't necessarily out-of-this-world sci-fi. Authors like Philip K Dick and Jonathan Lethem excel in this genre, and I like Marooned fits in it very nicely.

Released in 1969, it obviously takes place at a not-much-later date - the inclusion of SKYLAB, launched in 1973, proves this. The rescue vehicle used also looks like a very crude version of the space shuttle - a futuristic test vehicle that looks grounded in reality enough to escape being campy. A few lines of dialogue also hint that a Mars expedition is something that is considered to be right around the corner.

Most complaints in the comments section refer to the pacing. All i can say is: go read a book. If 90-minute action fests are your barometer for the worth of a film, go elsewhere. There are no exploding fireballs or meteors ripping through space stations with stereotypical crazy Russians here. Instead, you get a fully realized and believable view into what might happen if some of our astronauts became stranded in space.

Personally, I was invested fully into the film and felt sad when the movie ended, the same way I feel when I finish a good book. The pacing here, if you are interested in the subject matter, is fine. For fans of science fiction, this movie is a must-see. For those of us who actually can sit through a book and enjoy it (and I don't mean "page-turners"), this movie is a great way to spend an afternoon. For everyone else, please avoid. You will only drag this movie's rating further into the mud.

As a frequent user of the IMDb, I rarely write reviews but I feel compelled to put my 2 cents in on this one. I'm a science fiction fan, so I have seen and appreciated some very obscure works, yet I never heard of this movie. There is a big reason why... it's not good, it's not a classic, and that's why it's forgotten. First, I have to ask... why do people who rate movies like this a perfect 10 think anybody reads their reviews? You are stating this is the most superb piece of filmmaking art you have ever seen. Seriously? All you have proved is that whatever you have to say is totally worthless.

This movie is from 1969, so it's important to look at it in context. They threw together a few big stars & capitalized on the two biggest fads of the era: space & The Cold War. This could have been a classic if it were a 30 minute Twilight Zone episode. It's over 2 hour runtime borders on painful. It represents Hollywood appealing to the nation's lowest common denominator by combining a fad with star power and little else. Obviously they are masters of exploiting public stupidity since there are still people tasteless enough to keep raving about this flick 40+ years later.

Considered historically, it provides indisputable proof that the moon landing was 100% real, because not even Hollywood could fake it. It's award winning special effects make you wonder how the actors were able to keep a straight face while doing their zero G "acrobatics". Winning the Oscar has to be the Academy's version of dark humor considering the winner in its category the previous year was 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only reason this movie should be mentioned in the same breath as Kubrick's masterpiece is to point out how it's the opposite of everything that makes 2001 a work of art.

I respect the fact that many reviewers have a soft spot for this movie because they still look at it with child's eyes. I'm a little younger so my child nerd affection goes to movies like Space Camp. Yet even though I thought Space Camp was "wicked awesome" as a kid, I won't waste your time telling you it was a cinematic masterpiece. In fact Marooned can't even stand up to other Sci-fi disappointments with big potentials and poor execution, such as The Black Hole or Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Those two stinkers don't exactly set the bar very high either.

Just like Marooned is no perfect 10, it's not the very worst movie in the world either. It's got big stars and its about the space race & that can go along way. Just not a 2 hours and 14 minutes long of a way. It's a bit sub par of average in the history of Hollywood. Watch it if you wish to relive a piece of your childhood or get a slice of what America was crazy about at the time. Just do NOT expect a grand story or an amazing cinematic experience & you won't be disappointed.

OK, the film is plodding and the over caution and dourness of Gregory Peck's Dr. Keith gets irritating, but James Franciscus, stalwart of many a tv movie and dodgy international co-production, puts in a career best performance as the scientist-astronaut struggling to keep a grip on not only his faculties, but those of his fellow astronauts. Because he can work out scientifically what's going to happen, Clayton Stone (Franciscus) has the added burden. The scenes where he's trying to convince his wife back on Earth that they're going to make it, when the evidence is telling him in his mind of the opposite, the way he struggles with trying to convey how he feels when he's more a cerebral person and the end when its down to him to rescue himself and Buzz Lloyd (Hackman) are all excellently portrayed. It's a shame that he was seldom given another role that would have as much depth.

The best thing about Marooned is Lee Grant. She's really wonderful in a tiny role as the wife of the commander.

The worst thing about Marooned is that it's dated. Here's a sample line of dialogue that made me cringe: "Celia and I have been in this business 10 years. We learned that the best thing is for us girls to keep our feelings to ourselves and let the men get on with their jobs. Right, Celia?"

This is a dramatic story about three astronauts stranded in orbit. Richard Crenna, the spacecraft commander, and James Franciscus, the science systems astronaut, are very good. I especially liked Franciscus. Unfortunately, Gregory Peck is kind of stiff and stoic as the man in charge. Gene Hackman is the Apollo guidance pilot and as he gradually goes crazy, I'm not sure if I didn't like his acting or I didn't like his character. Anyway, I did not enjoy watching him.

The makers of this movie went to great lengths to be very accurate in their depiction of mission control, the Apollo capsule, costuming and such. Great production values all around. The storm looks really authentic too. It won an Oscar for best visual effects in 1970.

David Janssen plays an Air Force colonel who wants to launch a rescue mission against all odds. He's the heroic senior astronaut on the ground who wants to fly the X-RV into space to save them. It's never before been flown into space so there are some inherent dangers. When it's finally launched, it's actually a pretty thrilling sight.

It's a very quiet movie and the pacing is kind of slow. It's not bad, but overall, the movie had too much technology and perhaps too much realism - it needed a bit more storytelling and drama.

American astronauts Jim Pruett (Richard Crenna), Buzz Lloyd (Gene Hackman), and Clayton Stone (James Franciscus) have been living in the new space station for five months. The men are wore out. Their spacecraft malfunctions on the return trip and they are stranded in orbit. NASA Administrator Charles Keith (Gregory Peck) leads mission control in the rescue effort.

This is a slow dry thriller. It has as many thrills as a NASA news conference. Peck is playing a dry technocrat. It's more interested in a debate than the rescue effort. It has no juice and dies on the screen. It did win the Oscar for Special Visual Effects over its only competition, something called Krakatoa: East of Java. That's something. Right? Right...

I'm not sure when the first time I watched this movie was but it was before I went to work at NASA in mission control. After an astronaut on the space station recommended it to Ben Mankiewicz I just watched it again. I don't believe I had watched it since I went to work at NASA. I went to work in 1983 at NASA and Mission Control as an engineer technician. I worked in mission control for 12 years and an additional 2 years on the space shuttle simulators. My father went to work at Johnson Space Center (then MSC) in 1963 and I knew most of the Apollo astonauts and their kids.

I was stunned to see that every single detail in the mission control center, simulators and Kennedy Space Center was exactly correct. Every console, every module, every switch down to the screws on the console was exactly correct. My guess is they actually filmed it in Mission Montrol because everything was too correct. I worked on those consoles for 12 years and if they didn't film it in Mission Control it was the most elaborate stage set up I've ever seen.

It's also worthy to note that this movie was made before Apollo 13, before the space station Skylab, before the MMU or Manned Maneuvering Unit and before lifting bodies similar to the space shuttle. In this case identical to the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser has developed. All of the sets are period perfect period. I'm a stickler for detail when it comes to that kind of stuff and this was all exactly right. Not to mention the plot is completely feasible.

Amazingly, this was begun by none other than Frank Capra but the Hollywood veteran – who would subsequently make no more films – was replaced when his requested budget could not be met by Columbia (though the services of his son as Associate Producer were somehow retained); however, the studio then seemed more acquiescent when John Sturges came on board – given that the picture ended up exceeding the initially proposed budget by some $5 million!

Actually, Sturges had just come from another epic where the protagonists spend much of the time in a cramped environment, i.e. the submarine in ICE STATION ZEBRA (1968); this one, being based on real events and revolving around the novel space program rather than the tired Cold War formula of the Alistair MacLean adventure thriller, was a more significant undertaking – but the end result is nowhere near as entertaining! The film is both solemn and cold: as expected, it’s meticulously detailed – down to the irritating over-use of up-to-date jargon such as ‘So-and-so systems Are Go’, ‘Roger’, ‘Wilco’, etc.

Incidentally, while the presence of an all-star cast may have boosted its box-office potential (for the record MAROONED came hot on the heels of Stanley Kubrick’s even more bewildering but, ultimately, far more entrancing 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY [1968]), it distracts from the unfolding drama: Gregory Peck’s constricted role of the seasoned but stoic overseer would become a staple of 1970s disaster epics – here, he’s the head of the program who has to decide what to do when a shuttle’s re-entry fire malfunctions and the three-man astronaut crew is stranded in space (MAROONED can then be seen as the APOLLO 13 [1995] of its day, though the particular mission that film depicts would only occur in 1970!). An ex-colleague of theirs now employed in the Control Room (David Janssen) is the only one who believes that a rescue mission is possible in the restricted time-frame before the oxygen supply runs out; in fact, Peck has to be prodded by the U.S. President himself to take the challenge during a fairly risible sequence in which, distraught by the precarious situation he’s facing, Peck’s also pulled over on a highway by a couple of cops for over-speeding – even so, this remote chance is almost lost when the launch site is beset by a hurricane! The astronauts are well enough played by Richard Crenna, a hysterical Gene Hackman and James Franciscus – all of whom have wives and kids back home anxiously awaiting the resolution of their fate; when they’re given the chance to talk to them towards the end, the conversations are predictably awkward and touching. In fact, this latter section is the one that generates the most interest and suspense – especially when a Russian spacecraft turns up during the delicate transfer of two of the men (one has opted to sacrifice himself for the sake of the others) to the rescue vessel.

Unfortunately, one of the film’s trump cards back in 1969 – its Oscar-winning special effects – haven’t worn well the passage of time, being exposed by the extra clarity of the DVD transfer; however, this takes nothing away from the splendid cinematography by Sturges regular Daniel Fapp. One final thing: while the movie’s official length is given as 134 minutes, the version I watched ran for only 124 (in PAL mode); taking into consideration the different frame-rate when played in NTSC, it would still leave about five minutes unaccounted for – which I take to be an “Intermission” card, or some such addendum during its theatrical run, which wasn’t included here.

This movie blows big ones. It's supposed to be this dramatic film about "Disaster in space". The only disaster was watching this snorefest. Big name actors like Gene Hackman and Gregory Peck really had no effect. Gene does his best "Shatner" acting as he goes bezerk in his tin can. Stoney looks kind of "stoney". Footage reel of actual lift-offs and space shots are shown to convey excitement. It doesn't. You really have no empathy or care whether or not anyone lives. The end has a kind of funny twist, but you will be elated with joy when you see the words "The End". And to think this film won an Oscar for effects. I think back then, you got an award for being able to tie your shoes.

For fun, watch MST3K version. Crow does a killer Peck.