DEEP IMPACT (Paramount/DreamWorks) Starring: Tea Leoni, Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Elijah Wood, Leelee Sobieski, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell. Screenplay: Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin. Producers: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown. Director: Mimi Leder. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, intense scenes) Running Time: 115 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
If ever a film begged -- nay _pleaded_ -- to be a mini-series, that film is DEEP IMPACT. The first of this year's Large Celestial Object on a Collision Course with Earth films (soon to be followed by ARMAGEDDON) begins with the discovery of a comet which appears to be heading straight for us. Flash forward a year to an ambitious young MSNBC reporter named Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) who stumbles onto the story which the government has kept under wraps for fear of causing a panic. The President of the United States (Morgan Freeman) finally makes the comet's existence public at the same time he announces a plan to send an experimental spacecraft called the Messiah on a mission to deflect the comet from its trajectory. Flash forward another few months to the Messiah crew, including retired astronaut Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall) completing their mission with less than ideal success. Flash forward another few months as a plan to save humanity by hiding a million people in underground caves is set in motion.
That's enough flashing to give you the disorienting sensation of sitting through a cinematic strobe light. DEEP IMPACT wants to be a heroic disaster epic, examining the effect of impending devastation on individual people and their relationships, but that can only happen if we get to know the characters a little. Every one of DEEP IMPACT's sub-plots feels forced into a chunk of time far too small to do it justice. The central romance, involving a pair of high school sweethearts (Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski), makes the leap from tentative hand-holding to marriage without a single moment of conversation between them, deadening every supposedly emotional scene. Leoni's problems with her divorced parents (Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell) and the interpersonal dynamics of the Messiah crew members suffer a similar fate, straining for an audience response strictly on the basis of composer James Horner's over-wrought orchestrations. In fact, it often seems as though every bit of character interaction has been edited out of DEEP IMPACT except the tear-filled separations and reunions, leaving little more than a hollow succession of musical cues.
That may not be a tremendous surprise when you're dealing with a big-budget disaster film. What should come as a surprise is DEEP IMPACT's disappointing lack of visual energy. This is one sedate blockbuster, offering one invigorating set piece of the Messiah mission before settling into a dull march towards five minutes of destruction. Every other opportunity to dazzle is either turned into exposition or ignored entirely. The comet's separation into two fragments is explained by the President using a simple computer graphic, but never depicted; ditto for an attempted missile strike on the comet. We never even get to see the massive underground Ark after a huge narrative build-up. DEEP IMPACT is so bereft of spectacle and detail that it's never possible to grasp the immensity of the impending tragedy, or watch a year of mounting dread unfold. In fact, I can't imagine a more absurdly optimistic portrayal of human reaction to the coming Apocalypse, with the isolated traffic jam and a few fires being the only intrusion on a general response of beatific acceptance. It may be the end of the world as they know it, but they feel fine.
DEEP IMPACT boasts such a talented cast -- Duvall, Freeman, Redgrave, Schell, Charles Martin Smith, James Cromwell -- that occasionally it feels weightier than the script deserves. Mimi Leder's direction also offers a few effective moments, including a montage of reaction shots which provides more insight than all the dialogue combined. Most of the time, however, DEEP IMPACT feels like six hours of raw footage hacked to ribbons to meet the imperatives of feature film length. It's not exactly a bad film; it's just about one-third of an acceptably engrossing one. If you want to do justice to an Extinction Level Event, you need the 366 minutes of 1994's television adaptation of Stephen King's THE STAND. DEEP IMPACT's 115 minutes manage to turn a comet strike into a moderate inconvenience.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 comet tales: 4.
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