Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983)

I cannot recall what got me on a kick looking up the history of Barney Miller, and it looking to the cast a bit, but I found out that Hal Linden (Barney Miller) stared in a TV movie called Starflight: The Plane that Couldn't Land.  Because of my interest in science fiction, I though I had to check it out.

I was pretty surprised that this film and been pretty much forgotten, as it has a pretty impressive cast, including Lee Majors, who is know for the Six Million Dollar Man and Fallguy and Lauren Hutton, who I belive to be a note worthy actress, but I couldn't recall any film that she had been in.

After watching the film, I can see why it is nearly forgotten.  It is a disaster type movie, much like the Airport movies (None of which I have ever seen, but I have seen the Airport parody film Airplane! many, many times) but set in space.

While the film is anticlimactic and every one of the dangers Starflight One faces, it is even more odd that they were able to get one of the people off StarFlight One and back to earth, the same odd problem that Star Wars: The Last Jedi had, saying the crew was stranded, but people were some how able go leave the ship, so in fact they weren't stranded.

One other very odd thing about this film is that it had a space shuttle launch in hours of Starflight One getting stranded, at least twice.  While, going from months of planning to being able to launch in a few hours is utterly ridiculous, the fact the the shuttle has a LARGE CARGO BAY, which could accommodate all the passengers, means a single shuttle trip would be enough to rescue all the stranded passengers, except for the very contrived accidents which occurred in the film which prevent the passengers from boarding the shuttle, and even more strangely having the shuttle return to earth with only a single recused passenger, merely to return again a few hours latter to make another rescue attempt.

With any film, I appreciate that the look the time to make it, and see what they were attempting and I am glad to see such a wonderful cast, but unfortunately, lacking a well thought out and well written plot makes this film hardly worth tracking down.