Max Q (1998)

(On TV, November 1998) Inferior made-for-TV movie about a disaster aboard a space shuttle. Far from being even remotely realistic (even with a relative ignorance of actual NASA procedures, I was able to spot several mistakes), it can also “boast” of belonging to the cookie-cutter school of screenwriting, with painfully mistaken conventions of dramatic structure and characters that we’ve seen countless time before. It wasn’t a waste of time for me, since I consider a bad techno-thriller better than no techno-thriller at all, but less enthusiastic viewers might very well disagree. Max Q makes the fatal mistake of trying to emulate the superlative Apollo 13… and it’s not even close to being in the same league at the already-classic 1995 film.