Deep Impact, 1998

Deep Impact, 1998
Director: Mimi Leder
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood


Stage: Home theatre, late TV selection

Deep Impact in short: A teenage astronomer and his teacher discover an object amongst the stars at night. Little do they know that it's a comet on a direct collision course for earth. After the teacher dies in a car crash trying to report his findings the President announces the comet's existence. He also states that there is no need to panic, because NASA is going to send astronauts on the space mission, Messiah. Their mission is to destroy the comet before it gets too close to the earth. When Messiah backfires, the President announces that special caves will have to be built, and the government will have to have a lottery-of-fate to randomly select 800,000 ordinary American citizens to go along with 200,000 scientists, soldiers, and other officials. These 1,000,000 people will be set aside to save the population from extinction when the comet hits.

Preps: Hm, isn't this one of the "The earth will be destroyed unless" clones? I am not sure.


Reality: Yep, I am right. I remember now, when the plot comes thru the first scenes. I have seen this one before. It's a special genre, if it would exist for real, several very notorious movies would fit into this. Because they all describe the same thing, fear of all fears. This time not in shape of alien, but in shape of a comet (meteor), usually found by one weird scientist, then making all the world upside down. The first and maybe the one with most lovely actors, in this sense, would be Armageddon, surprisingly enough made in the same year. Who copied from who, remains the question. Because Deep Impact is virtually very similar to Armageddon or vice versa. But doesn't have the famous cast as the Armageddon has. Nevertheless, Deep Impact in comparison, holds a few plus points - for instance: the stories before the comet appears and the parallel stories about relationships, that go very deep (in comparison with Willis's ship). Surprise from viewer's perspective, and refreshing, anyway. In some deep imagination I would guess that most of the viewers just are anxious to see the impact or the rescue mission itself and the vaporization. They don't really care what the relationships between people in this story are. Just the mere wolfy observation of the impact would be enough. And can drive powerful enough.
In this case, you are dragged into various relationships and traumas the people going on the mission (or reporting about it) are having from the past. And the way some of it is resolved up to a point. Tea Leoni seems to have the last quote here, but I would rather not spend any money on trying to make journalist profession not a voulter one. It is such and any time spent on persuasing audience it isn't so, is a long gone investment. Beside the point, we are talking about extinction and therefore it doesn't fit into yellow journalism anyway. Why bring up the honour and pride (or commitment to the public must know dogma)?

In any case, case closed at the end of the day, humankind solved, heroes (again US and Russian - how predictable :( No extra adventure or fun here.


My personal rating: 4,0 (some entertainment and a good start. Also like the side part of the movie, when you wipe the impact out :)

Deep Impact on IMDB