For 1976, and therefore without computer graphics and the like to create Armegeddon on a shoestring, this is still a solid little "disaster" movie, with good to excellent acting by all concerned. However, I would simply like to address one aspect of the film, which is fairly unusual and actually builds up the suspense: In this movie, with opening narration from Robert Conrad's police sergeant, we have a short build-up that shows almost all of the most important characters in the film on Interstate 5, while simultaneously there is a kind of police pursuit involving one of them going on. Conrad immediately tells us that there will be a smash-up involving thirty-nine cars, that sixty-two people (including himself) will be injured in it, and that fourteen of them will be killed. Then comes the actual smash-up, very well done for its time and budget, and we see easily a dozen or so accidents, crashes, fires, etc. but without the final reckoning - and then everything stops(!). At this point, we are immediately transported back about forty hours to see the events leading up to the disaster. Now that we have seen so many of the characters involved in that smash-up and know what is bound to happen, we take an added interest in those that the story concentrates upon, and we can only hope (since those characters are reasonably well-written and well-presented) that the ones we like will survive, and that those we don't like (and there are several intensely disagreeable people on display) will be the ones receiving their just desserts. Offhand, the only prior film I can recall that takes this approach - disaster first, then exposition on the characters involved in it before tallying the results - is the 1933 British film "Friday the Thirteenth", starring, of all people, Jessie Matthews, although "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" also involves such flashback exposition (except in that famous Thornton Wilder tale we already know the identities of those who perished). We have at least one murder, two shootings (one of which definitely results in a death), and what seems to be an attempted suicide, in the stories leading up to the crash. Some of it doesn't turn out the way the viewer might want, and of the thirteen or fourteen characters we get to know in the flashback story, nine of them are on the road when the smash-up takes place. And at this point, we are brought back to the beginning of the film and again see the identical two minutes or so leading up to the smash-up that the story opened with (and including a repeat of Conrad's narration)), except that this time the film proceeds through the disaster and to the ultimate destinies of those nine characters. And here comes the "spoiler" (but not much of one): Only four of them die, so the suspense really involves just which four they are. And since we've been told that the crash involved fourteen deaths and we know that those nine people accounted for only four of them, we may be left to wonder about the untold stories of the other ten deceased people. But you won't, because four or five happy or unhappy resolutions are about as much as one can absorb in a 90-minute TV movie.
Quite well done, actually, and with good direction and a very solid cast of players making it all reasonably believable.
Quite well done, actually, and with good direction and a very solid cast of players making it all reasonably believable.