Countdown is a 1967 science fiction film directed by Robert Altman, based on the 1964 novel The Pilgrim Project by Hank Searls.

The film stars James Caan and Robert Duvall as astronauts vying to be the first American to walk on the Moon as part of an accelerated program to beat the Soviet Union.

In the late 1960s, after learning that the Russians will be launching a Moon landing mission in four weeks, NASA decides to activate the "Pilgrim Project".

He would stay on the Moon for a few months in a shelter pod launched and landed before him and wait for astronauts from an Apollo mission to arrive and retrieve him.

He encounters a power drain malfunction en route which tests his character and hinders radio contact.

Altman was fired as director of the film for delivering footage that featured actors talking over each other; it was so unusual for that time that studio executives considered it incompetence rather than an attempt to make scenes more realistic.

In a May 1968 review of Countdown for The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson calls the film a "limp space-flight drama" which "makes the moon seem just as dull as Mother Earth".

[4] A February 1985 review in Malaysia's New Straits Times calls Countdown "dated" and complains that the characters have "no depth or direction".

"[6] In Visions of the future, relics of the past, a June 1995 story in The New York Times, dealing with the history of spaceflight movies, Thomas Mallon appreciates that the film "highlights the space program's early can-do ethos".