Les naufragés de l'espace

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.

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.

I've always liked this movie, still holds some modern jaded audiences to the edge of their seats. One comment. I saw this at age 10 in a downtown theater in original 70mm print. The curtain opened and the house lights went half dim. I knew what I was looking at on the screen but I suspect I was the only one there who did. I kept yanking on my dad's arm, pointing at the (blank?) screen, yelling "look!" "look!". The original opening was the coolest thing I've EVER seen on screen, a near silent, ultra-slow zoom-out and slow pan to the horizon through a fully extended Baker-Nunn camera that was looking out into nothing but black outer space. Damn amazing. Total, utter, deep space - pure blackness until it got to the horizon. Outstanding. There's about 10 seconds on the DVD, it was more like 10 minutes in the theater. Gave you a real feel for where these guys were about to end up Marooned -in-. The only thing I've ever seen on film that compares - and it's the reverse situation - is the ending of Electraglide in Blue. I'll never forget it. Thank you old time American cinema. These days you'd get commercials for your 9 dollars.

...Marooned is a good movie.

If you're inclined to consider when it was made, or you're old enough to remember when the idea of manned space exploration was actually exciting, you might even think it's great. The worst thing I can say is that it's certainly not fast-paced: if you're looking for a sci-fi action spectacular, this probably isn't going to be your cup of tea.

The specifics are covered very well in previous users' comments (and in Roger Ebert's ***/**** review), so I won't repeat them here.

There is one thing I'd like to clarify, though, if I may:

Anyone looking at the user ratings and user comments should take into consideration that a (very) abbreviated version of this movie was shown on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 as "Space Travelers." I'm a pretty hardcore MST fan myself, and I agree that it was a funny episode. However, there's a certain type of MSTie that finds it entertaining to visit the IMDb and "vote" (negatively, of course) for the movies featured in their favourite episodes, with a view to knocking them down into the IMDb's "Bottom 100" list. Sometimes this is reasonably well-deserved: honestly, some of the worst (best) movies featured on MST3K would be indefensible in any form. Other times, particularly when the original is cut to pieces (this one lost approximately 1:15 of its 2:15 running time, while "gaining" some lousy incidental music and a shabby new title sequence*), I don't think it's right at all.

If you want to watch an interesting, thought-provoking sci-fi drama, "Marooned" is a good bet. If you want to watch a funny episode of MST3K, "Space Travelers" (#0401) is an equally good bet. You can even watch and enjoy both, as I have. Don't let the strange mix of votes and comments here dissuade you from watching it entirely, though, because that would be a mistake.

(A minor mistake, admittedly, but still -- a mistake.)

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* Credit where it's due: most of this hack job was courtesy of re-distributor Film Ventures International, and not the folks at MST3K. If you come across a non-MST'd version of this movie that runs about 1:30, don't waste your time: I guarantee it'll be neither interesting _or_ funny.