Deep Impact Review
by Seth Bookey (sethbook AT panix DOT com)June 29th, 1998
Deep Impact (1998)
Seen on 14 June 1998 by myself for $5.50 at the SONY Loews Showplace
I am a real sucker. I cried at this movie. But remember that I cry during everything. If children die, parents die, dogs or cats die, if any of them come back from the other world to haunt and love you, if someone knows they are dying and are having a final farewell, if something selfless and devoted happens, I am there with Kleenex (TM). Heck, I cried during the McDonalds commercial when they make that retarded kid they hired feel important because they let him work there. So I am a big mushpot, okay? I love a good movie and a good cry and it's nice when they coincide but they can be mutually exclusive. Read on...
*Deep Impact* knows exactly how to manipulate the emotions. This is essential since there is a variety of problems with the screenplay. The first problem is that there are too many characters. The magic is that they are able to manipulate a great deal of them into emotional situations that an extinction-level event like a meteor hitting Western Canada will bring.
Unfortunately, the main reason people go to these movies is to see the destruction and the special effects, so the movie's best scenes appear in commercials and the surprises are at a minimum. For example, the whole beginning of the movie could have had more impact (no pun intended) if they took the tack of MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) stumbling onto something big first, and then showed the comet's discovery in flashback.
So, we all know a huge comet is coming toward Earth. Luckily, President Beck (Morgan Freeman) is hopeful that the big spaceship Messiah headed by Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner (Robert Duvall) will be able to implant nuclear warheads in the moving meteor by landing on it (sound pretty impossible, eh?). His backup plan is "The Ark"--a huge cave that will house the best minds in America (Europe apparently is on another planet) and people selected by lottery. [The real sci-fi aspect is this: How did a black man get elected to the Presidency in the present time? I don't expect to see that in my own lifetime, and I'm a young liberal!] It's set in the present, and being an anti-senior nation, no one older than 50 is allowed in the tunnel. This poses a problem to Jenny, as her mother is played by Vanessa Redgrave--a national treasure, for God's sake! It's an outrage! Didn't anyone see Julia? Are we still mad about her PLO affections? Someone should have made an exception. This country was built on making exceptions.
Known for her work on the TV series *ER*, director Mimi Leder does a pretty good job with a panoramic script that calls for nationalistic space heroics involving an astronaut crew and their families, a teenage love story and their two families, the reporter and her divorced parents and all her coworkers, and a President who's married to a family we never actually see and all the President's men. There is just way too much going on here. Her successes, however, are the emotional tearjerker scenes, and the scenes involving tension, as seen in the two space missions. These required good direction and editing.
The actors do a pretty good job. Redgrave and Duvall are excellent as always. Leoni is pretty good as well, considering this is her first lead role in a summer blockbuster. Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski are good as the teenage lovers, considering how little that story was shown.
Two more problems: The movie is a commercial for NBC and MSNBC. Those logos are throughout the film. Stars from *ER* and NBC--Ron Eldard and Blair Underwood as two of the astronauts, and Laura Innes as Beth Stanley are here also. The other problem is that the special effects are not all that great. It's about two steps up from NRA Chairman Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments from the 1950s. Plus, knowing a comet is heading to the Atlantic, why was anyone in NYC, much less sitting leisurely reading a paper in Washington Square Park. I guess it's more fun to destroy New York City when you get to see New Yorkers hurt also. The only thing missing was a woman absentmindedly walking her baby in a pram across Broadway while the tsunami wave is bearing down on her.
*Deep Impact* is best seen trapped in the theatre, in the full grasp of it's manipulation. You'll laugh (unintentionally), you'll cry, you'll see New York destroyed (again). Just try to pay less than full price.
Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin. At least that's what they called it.
----------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 1998, Seth J. Bookey, New York, NY 10021 [email protected]; http://www.panix.com/~sethbook
More movie reviews by Seth Bookey, with graphics, can be found at
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