Deep Impact Review
by Curtis Edmonds (blueduck AT hsbr DOT org)May 22nd, 1998
by Curtis Edmonds -- [email protected]
The 1990's will be remembered in twenty-first century film schools as the Decade of the Digital Disaster. This is the time when new advances in computer graphics and modeling are leading to... well, not bigger and better movies, but bigger and better explosions, anyway. Like any good group of little boys, the disaster moviemakers are using their powerful new tools to take things apart and blow them up. Want to see the White House explode by an alien attack? Want to see a great green atomic lizard flatten New York skyscrapers? Want to see a giant tidal wave wash away the Brooklyn Bridge? You want it, the CGI boys can do it. (Although God knows why they're so hard on New York.)
But it's one thing to have these new toys, and quite another to make good movies with them. Snappy computer graphics can't save movies without believable storylines or interesting characters -- case in point: Alex Proyas's Dark City -- while the same quality graphics integrated with classy acting and writing (and all the other things that Titanic had going for it) can make a movie magical.
Somewhere right in the middle is Deep Impact. The graphics quality is first-rate, although most of it is at the end of the movie, and the filmmakers wisely limit the scenes of death and devastation. Deep Impact takes the road less traveled in disaster genre movies, choosing to focus on people and their relationships instead of action and suspense. While other movies have concentrated on the wholesale destruction of landmarks and cities, Deep Impact saves much of its concern for the destruction of families and friendships. While it's possible to sit back, munching popcorn, contemplating the destruction of a digital Manhattan with an awed "Cool," there's something moving about the ending of human relationships, no matter how badly or inexpertly handled.
The problem with Deep Impact isn't the genuinely touching and wrenching moments, easily the best part of the movie. The moments and the emotions would be there no matter how well the movie was written. The problem is that the people we follow throughout the movie almost seem to be chosen at random: the crew of the space vessel sent to stop the comet, the family of the teenage astronomer who discovers the comet, the MSNBC news team who follows the story: The end result is something reminiscent of Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, another end-of-the-world epic with a large and unwieldy ensemble cast. (Any other similarity is incidental, Deep Impact is nothing if not sincere, and levity is sorely lacking.) And by picking a large number of ordinary people to suffer through the end of the world, what you get is a very ordinary movie.
It doesn't really help that almost everyone in the movie is a refugee from NBC's Thursday night lineup. (It certainly doesn't help that the MSNBC network is referenced at every conceivable point.) Most notably, you have Tea Leoni (The Naked Truth), a gifted comic actor who looks woefully stiff and out of place behind the anchor desk. Throw in Bruce Weitz (Hill Street Blues) and Laura Innes (ER) on the news team, and Ron Eldard (ER), Blair Underwood (L.A. Law) and Jon Favreau (Friends) aboard the oddly-named Messiah spacecraft, and what you have is a Must See TV-Movie.
The two leads are, thankfully, America's Greatest Actor -- Morgan Freeman -- and Robert Duvall, who's not that far behind. Unfortunately -- and this is a chronic complaint of mine -- neither of them are given enough to do. Freeman is the President, but (outside of an early conflict with Leoni) he is never seen doing anything Presidential. He is the oracle, the narrator, providing reassurance, oratory, and plot points. Which is fine, and he's great, but it's not enough. On the other hand, Duvall is at the heart of the action, aboard the spacecraft, and he is -- Chuck Yeager! Yes! Supercool, lollygagging around up there in outer space, the sole standard-bearer for Tom Wolfe's righteous stuff, all ready for the next comet landing or spark plug commercial... and it's a mold that he never breaks out of. I suppose parts like this are the price that Duvall -- and the rest of us -- have to pay for the privilege of movies like The Apostle, so I won't comment too severely on his choice of scripts.
The one thing I took out of the theater from Deep Impact was the sterling quality of the THX system in Austin's Lincoln 6 theater. Whenever the camera pans past the comet in space, the THX emits this rumble that made the walls shake -- sort of like a low-level Sensurround. (Never mind that real comets couldn't possibly make that rumble in the soundless vacuum of outer space.) Despite the movie's refreshing attention to relationships over explosions (there's only one completely mindless and extraneous explosion, early in the film), when the standout part of the movie is the sound system, something's missing. There's a lot missing from Deep Impact, a perfectly ordinary and middle-of-the-road disaster flick in every regard.
Rating: B
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Curtis Edmonds
[email protected]
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