DEEP IMPACT
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: ** out of ****
Scientists have posited that a large meteor struck the earth millions of years ago and killed the dinosaurs. Mimi Leder's DEEP IMPACT faces humanity with the same fate. While with his astronomy club one evening, high school student Leo Biederman spots an unknown star and has a picture of it sent to Marcus Wolf, a club advisor who works at a nearby telescopic observatory. Wolf identifies the object as a meteor, not a star, and plots its trajectory, only to find that it is due to collide with the earth.
The United States government keeps this information under wraps for a year, when MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni), unwittingly uncovers the story while following up leads on what she thinks is a sex scandal within the President's cabinet. Soon thereafter, President Beck (Morgan Freeman) makes a televised announcement that a meteor roughly the size of New York City will hit the planet within a year, causing what is known as an ELE, or extinction level event. What isn't destroyed by the initial impact will eventually succumb to the lack of sunlight caused by the sun's being obscured by debris. On the bright side, a joint U.S./Russian mission to destroy the cosmic interloper has already been planned. Using the new nuclear "Orion Drive", the largest spaceship ever built will take six astronauts out to the meteor, where they will land on the surface, drill into it, and plant nuclear devices which, when detonated, will break the meteor up into small, harmless pieces.
I'm not giving away a whole lot by saying that the mission is not entirely successful. The movie poster has a meteor hitting the earth, and every commercial I've seen shows a giant wave bearing down on New York. The bulk of this film is devoted to an emotional reconciliation amongst the main characters in what are surely the last days of their lives, superimposed against the backdrop of a mission to save humanity. What results is basically a long wait until the meteor gets here.
You see, DEEP IMPACT bills itself as a disaster movie, but what it lacks are, well, disasters. Most disaster movies put their earthquakes, eruptions, nuclear explosions, etc. somewhere around the middle of the film and have the main characters try to deal with salvaging what they can, or prevent a final, fatal disaster from happening. Remember METEOR from 1979? The premise was much the same: A meteor is coming to crush the earth. However, throughout the film, splinters off the main rock hurtle our way and impact the planet, giving us enough eye candy to tempt our visual taste buds and make us say, "Gee, if a splinter did that, what's the big one going to do?" No such luck with this film. Instead, we just get poor development of characters we only intermittently care about, and the film therefore fails to maintain the tension of impending doom. Like I said, a long wait until the meteor gets here.
The characters are forgettable largely due to fundamental faults in the screenplay. In a movie about the potential end of civilization, why choose a reporter as the lead? The Jenny Lerner character is one of the most uninteresting of the film, yet she is thrust to the forefront. Leo Biederman is played nicely by Elijah Wood, but Biederman is also a character whose presence is questionable. President Beck's credibility as a component of the film was unfortunately undermined by a terribly corny speech at the movie's finale. What a waste of a convincing performance by Morgan Freeman.
There are a few things in the film which just don't make sense, and therefore distract the viewer from the rest of the movie, while you try and figure out what they meant. For example, while following her scandal leads, Jenny sees cases of Ensure, a dietary supplement for seniors, being loaded onto a boat belonging to presidential cabinetmember Alan Rittenhouse (James Cromwell). A little while later, she is taken to a secret meeting with the President in the kitchen of some restaurant, where she also notices a large supply of Ensure. We have no idea of the significance of this connection, as there are many plausible explanations for the presence of Ensure at both locations.
The special effects, however, are excellent, as you would expect from George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. The big wave is probably the best part of the whole film, although whoever decided to show the head of the Statue of Liberty floating underwater should really get a slap. You know, every time there's a disaster movie involving New York City, they've got to put in the head of the Statue of Liberty breaking off, or buried in debris, or floating in the water, like it was the first time anybody's done it. Please.
Review posted May 18, 1998
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