Released a year before Apollo 11 touched down on the surface of the moon, Countdown ushered in Altman's move to features with a hypothetical lunar mission rushed into action to beat the Russians in the Space Race. Given its flat look and stodgy pacing, the film isn't so much a farewell to TV as a scaling up, and these days it doesn't look out of place on the small screen.
Altman has complained that the film was taken out of his hands in post-production, largely to eliminate his soon-to-be-trademark overlapping dialogue. A few remaining instances and the heavy use of looped dialogue seem to bear out this contention, though it's unlikely that Countdown would have ever been more than a minor programmer.
Adapted by Loring Mandel from former naval aviator Hank Searls' novel The Pilgrim Project, Countdown involves a secret NASA plan to put a man on the moon before the Apollo program is ready should the Russians step up their own efforts at a moon shot. The inevitable happens, and Robert Duvall's no-nonsense military officer Chiz is selected for the one-man mission. But when the Soviets launch a geologist rather than a soldier in their own attempt, the U.S. sees no choice but to send a civilian of their own, rather than risk the appearance of militarizing the moon. Lee Stegler (James Caan) is chosen, and the bitter Chiz grudgingly agrees to train him for the mission.
Just two years before M*A*S*H, Duvall's character looks forward to Maj. Frank Burns, but there's no Hawkeye or Trapper John to undercut his square-jawed flag-waving. The film is simply a straightforward space drama, with even the novel's glimpses of the toll on those left at home curtailed in the film (the Caan character's wife, a recovering alcoholic in the novel, would seem to be a tempting character for Altman, but Joanna Moore's Mickey does little more than support and worry over her husband).
There are glimpses of a more interesting film from time to time. As Chiz gathers Lee and fellow astronaut Rick (Michael Murphy) to inform them of the secret mission, Chiz's wife (Barbara Baxley) looks on, startled, from the next room. She's not only obviously not been informed of her husband's life-and-death mission, she's not even enough of a factor in his mind to be shielded from the information. It's an intriguing peek into the domestic dynamics that apparently interested the director, suggesting that perhaps a more nuanced role for Moore was left on the cutting room floor. As it stands, the most interesting relationship is that between Chiz and Lee, which intermingles professional respect with personal grudges in a way that would be amplified and subverted in later Altman films.
Most damaging to the film as it stands is the ending, which Altman purportedly shot with an ominous ambiguity. Stegler is meant to land only if he can spy the shelter in which he's supposed to live for the next year, until Apollo can launch a rescue mission, from orbit. He rolls the dice and lands without positively IDing the structure, and sets out to search for the shelter's homing beacon with only eight hours of oxygen in his suit. As Altman describes his version, the film would have ended with Stegler settling on a direction and beginning to walk, with the camera pulling out to reveal that he's actually heading away from his only chance at survival. Instead, the ending was reshot with a tepid happy ending, with Caan wordlessly stumbling upon the beacon.
Viewed now, Countdown is largely interesting as a curiosity, both as the beginning in earnest of Altman's feature directorial career and as an artifact of the Space Race in the last days before Neil Armstrong's immortal moonwalk.
