Deep Impact Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (serdar AT thegline DOT com)April 30th, 1999
Deep Impact (1998)
* * 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
"Deep Impact", disaster-season-twin to the wretched "Armageddon", is an absorbing enough movie when it unfolds in front of you. But when it's over, its seams (and there are a lot of them) bulk huge.
I'll be fair. Instead of becoming the comedic macho-porn action-movie cliche that "Armageddon" sunk to, "Deep Impact" tries to deal realistically with the possibility of global annihilation. It falls short, I suspect, because there are far too many times that we are reminded, however quietly, that we are only watching a movie.
"Deep Impact" opens with young Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) peeking at the heavens through his telescope. There's something up there which doesn't seem to register on the charts, and it takes professional astronomer Marcus Wolf (Charles Martin Smith) to figure out it's a comet on a collision course for Earth. He rushes out the door of the observatory with his data disk in his hand, and then gets himself killed in a crash with a semi. Right off the bat this told me the movie is not above using cheap plot devices to build suspense.
No matter. The movie skips ahead a year, into Plot Thread Two. Not-so- intrepid reporter Jenny *Lerner* (get it?) stumbles across a scandal involving a Presidential cabinet member and what she believes to be a mistress named "Ellie". Lerner is played by Tea Leone as someone who only seems to be about 66% there. Later on, when she's an MSNBC anchor, she's so wooden and lifeless I was waiting for a cane to come from offscreen and yank her out of the chair.
Of course, the scandal is not the news about "Ellie", but "E.L.E.", or an Extinction Level Event -- the aforementioned comet plowing into the earth and decimating life as we know it. In a nice little scene, President Beck (Morgan Freeman) confronts Lerner about the news and forces her to balance her own ego against the welfare of billions. In a movie where a lot of things are not terribly convincing, Freeman is completely convincing as the President, even when he is mouthing platitudes like, "Life will go on; we will prevail," with all the certainty of a man who doesn't want to get caught with his britches down.
When the news finally breaks, the President unveils a plan to send a space probe to the comet and blow it to pieces with nukes (gee, where have we heard that plan before?). This is, of course, Plot Thread Three. The probe, named the Messiah, is piloted by "the last man to walk on the moon", astronaut Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall). There's a moment where Tanner seems to be at odds with his crew -- "They're not afraid of death -- just looking bad on TV" -- but nothing much is made of it; I suspect either the film or the script was originally much longer, and many of the emotional subtexts for such scenes is missing.
This seems to be the heart of the problem with the movie: it doesn't convince us that the planet is really at stake. Sure, there's panic and looting and people boarding up their windows. There's a truly jaw-dropping (unfaked) shot of an interstate highway crammed with refugees. At least we don't get the obligatory shots of the wild-eyed street-corner preacher with the sign reading THE END IS NIGH.
But... somehow... there's an additional emotional level to all of this that seems to be missing. The script tries to make up for it rather ham-handedly through some synthetic heart-tugs. One is Lerner's estranged parents, and another -- so unconvincing it almost sinks the movie singlehandedly -- is Leo and his girlfriend, a plot thread which starts well but rapdily degenerates into something out of "For The Love of Benji", with kids scrambling tearfully through the wilderness on mopeds.
When disaster finally strikes, the movie's messages are even more confused. Are we supposed to sit aghast at the destruction, or point at the screen and go, "Oo, cool! They blew away the Brookyn Bridge!" The effects show at the end belies the movie's intentions -- not because it's there, but because it doesn't know how to show what's going on except in terms of shopworn disaster- movie cliches -- people pointing, screaming, running, buildings falling over, etc. What emotional involvement we've built with the movie is tossed in favor of a money shot; a CGI-driven End Times Porn. And then we get the conclusion, in which the filmmakers cleverly cheat the story and pull not one but two endings out of their hat.
What would have worked here? I'm not sure. Part of the problem is the movie is an uneasy alliance of two stories -- serious studies of human beings faced with hopeless situations like "The Day After" or "The Sacrifice", and spectacle- effects movies like, yes, "Armageddon". Somewhere along the line they should have just picked one track and stuck with it to the bitter end.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't a bad movie. It's professional-looking, relatively well-acted, and fast-moving (courtesy of Mimi Leder's fluid direction). I guess the big problem is that "Armageddon" makes it look like a masterpiece, when it just isn't.
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