COUNTDOWN

Countdown (1967) opens with a bold, ominous score by Leonard Rosenman that sets a tone like one of those big-budget disaster movies that would dominate the '70s.  Unfortunately, the film doesn’t quite deliver on that tension, and never fully realizes any of the edge-of-your-seat thrill that the opening music promises.

Directed by Robert Altman, Countdown is about the U.S. scramble to beat the Soviet Union to the moon, an idea that must have felt very current at the time. When the government finds out the Russians are only four weeks away from landing, NASA launches the secretive Pilgrim Project: a desperate plan to send one man on a one-way trip to the moon, where he'll survive on pre-sent supplies and a small living pod until a later mission can (hopefully) bring him home.

Things get complicated when the powers that be decide not to send Chiz (Robert Duvall), the experienced Air Force colonel, because they don’t want the first man on the moon to be military.  Instead, they choose Lee Stegler (James Caan), a civilian geologist with less experience, and Chiz is the one expected to get him ready in a matter of weeks.  Unsurprisingly, he’s not very happy about that.

The premise is solid, and both Duvall and Caan give strong performances, but the story tends to meander at times.  Shooting in real NASA locations adds a nice layer of realism, but the moon scenes, shot in the craggy Mojave Desert, look pretty unrealistic, especially from a modern perspective.  What might have passed for lunar terrain in 1967 just doesn’t hold up anymore.

Interestingly, Altman was fired after filming wrapped.  Warner Bros. reportedly hated his use of overlapping dialogue, a technique that would become one of his trademarks, and cut him out of the editing process. They even reshot parts of the film and changed his original, more ambiguous ending.

At just over 100 minutes, Countdown is a fairly quick watch. It’s not a stellar film, but it's a decent drama with an intriguing (if a bit far-fetched) concept.  Altman steers the focus more toward the emotional and human side of the space race than the politics or tech, and that choice is what makes the film worth checking out.