Marooned (1969)
Directed by John Sturges
After spending several months in an orbiting lab, three astronauts prepare to return to Earth only to find their de-orbit thrusters won't activate. After initially thinking they might have to abandon them in orbit, NASA decides to launch a daring rescue. Their plans are complicated by a hurricane headed towards the launch site—and a shrinking air supply in the astronauts' capsule.
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What critics compared Marooned to
There they see John Sturges' Marooned (1969).
In later scenes in which Cuaron suggests a possible inspiration for “Gravity,” the family goes to see John Sturges’ sci-fi thriller “Marooned” (1969) at the local movie theater.
When the family packs itself off to a neighborhood moviehouse, the feature playing is “Marooned” (1969), a film whose plot is remarkably similar to that of Cuarón’s previous release, the Oscar-winning “Gravity.”
In the middle of Roma, we see some boys (including Pepe, a character who seems to be a version of young Cuarón himself) convince their grandmother to let them see Marooned, the 1969 lost-in-space sci-fi flick starring Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman.
Plunging into the Meta level, we recognize allusions to Cuarón’s 2013 film, Gravity , as Cleo and the children watch the 1969 sci-fi blockbuster, Marooned.
There’s even a nod to Gravity in the family’s visit to the cinema to see John Sturges’ Marooned.
You might see Ad Astra as an attempt to revive an archaic genre, nail-biting space adventure in the grand style—like Alfonso Cuarón’s film, it carries echoes of John Sturges’ 1969 Marooned.
Consistent with the past decade’s run of high-profile space thrillers – including Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), The Martian (2015), and First Man (2018) – as well as the influential “NASA procedurals” Countdown (1967) and Marooned (1969), Gray’s film is absorbed with the process by which humans are hurled across thousands, millions, or billions of miles of airless nothingness.
John Sturges’ similarly wonky but comparatively turgid 1969 feature Marooned is an obvious touchstone, and viewers who are not space exploration junkies or NASA history enthusiasts may be a bit lost at times.
A spot of China ex Machina is forgivable to the long memoried, who recall how the Russians stepped up to the plate in Marooned (1969).
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It's not as good as The Right Stuff, but it's light years ahead of 1969's Marooned, which, prophetically, offered up a similar story as science fiction but was so very, very dull.
Joe Penna's sophomore feature clearly owes a debt to 1969's Marooned in its depiction of a small space crew dealing with a life-threatening crisis.
"Marooned" isn't very interesting from a stylistic point of view, and the actors tend to get buried beneath the technology, but it does tell an exciting story, And that, I imagine, was all Sturges (whose storytelling includes "The Great Escape" and "Bad Day at Black Rock") was really trying to do.