For whatever reason I decided to watch John Sturges‘ Marooned (’69) yesterday afternoon on Turner Classic Movies. I was in my hotel room and fiddling around and suddenly there it was, and since I’d never actually watched it start to finish I figured “why not?…in 2013 Alfonso Cuaron told Wired magazine that he watched over and over as a kid.” Maybe so but Marooned is an embarassment — comically inauthentic, a stiff. Compared to the verisimilitude of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13 and Gravity it’s like an Ed Wood film. How could Sturges, a tough pro who knew from quality, have made something this mediocre? Poor Gregory Peck, poor David Janseen, poor James Franciscus, poor Richard Crenna, poor Gene Hackman, poor Nancy Kovack, poor Lee Grant, poor Mariette Hartley, etc. They all behave as if they’d just been told they have cancer. From Wiki page: The 1970 Mad magazine satire of Marooned, called Moroned, described story events in actual film time. NASA officials are pressed to launch the X-RT — ‘the Experimental Rescue Thing’ — in ‘about an hour…maybe…an hour and a half, tops”. One astronaut sacrifices his life to escape the film critics.”