Deep Impact
A Review
By Jeremiah Rickert
Starring: Tea Leoni, Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Elijah Wood Directed by: Mimi Leder
Since the cities of the world were fried by the malevolent aliens of Independence Day, the apocalypse has been tres chic to the film-industry. It's like the 70s all over again, only this time the budgets are bigger, and the marketing/packaging causes you to believe that this isn't like those films...this is a serious drama. Uh huh...of course it is.
In a summer-blockbuster season that sees not one, but two object-hurtling towards earth films (Deep Impact, and the upcoming Armageddon) and of course Godzilla, and of course, previous summer's volcano extravaganza, it seems another era of "crowds- trying to outrun the disaster" camera angles, and "the end of life as we know it" philosophizing is upon us. Deep Impact's villain is a comet that a young astronomy student Leo Biederman, played by Elijah Wood (Flipper, North, The Ice Storm) happens to scope out one day while on an astronomy club outing. He snaps a photo of it, which is developed by a scientist-type (Charles Martin-Smith in a wasted role) who unfortunately has a car accident before being able to spread the word. We don't know if the photo and computer disk with the information are destroyed in the explosion of his jeep or not. This is supposed to be suspenseful.
We are then introduced to aspiring news anchor Jenny Lerner, played with much facial intensity by Tea Leoni (Tv's The Naked Truth). She's deal a story about a government official (James Cromwell, in another massively wasted role) who resigns his position as a cabinet member apparently because his wife is ill. Rumours abound as to why this is, including that his wife is an alcoholic, and it's because he's having an affair. One of his aides, tells Jenny that he talks to an Elle, has a private phone line, and shuts his door when it rings. She decides to confront the man about it, and she suddenly becomes very ominous, telling her she has the biggest story of her life, and that she needs to keep it a secret. She of course thinks he's talking about an affair, and is just egotistic. She is stopped by secret service on her way back to the office and introduced to the president, who asks her to sit on the story until they make an official announcement. She still thinks this is just an affair, but the President refers to elle as ELE and that gets her thinking. At the ensuing press-conference, she puts it all together as the president informs the nation that a comet is heading straight for us. He offers hope in a space mission to plant nukes deep into the surface of the comet.
Enter: The Action part of the film. Miraculously, our Russian allies have invented a wonderful propulsion system, that will zip a crew of astronauts towards the comet, where they will plant the nukes that will throw it on another course. If that plan fails, then a volley of nukes will be launched from the surface of the earth...and if that fails...well, the government has been secretly constructing "the ark" an undergroudn facility that will protect the chosen few from the destruction and guarantee that (the american way of) life will go on.
Of course, Leder's beef with action films is that they don't have any humanity, and she stuffs this film with enough fake humanity to make you ill. The human drama can be presented either tastefully or manipulatively, and in this case, I believe it comes across as manipulative. There are countless scenes using children to gain the sympathy of the audience. Kids are the ultimate in things that everyone can releate to. Politicians speak of "our children, and our children's children" after all, who could be against children? It gets milked too often...parents desperately thrusting their babies towards the "chosen" hoping one of them will take them along, little kids saying goodbye to their parents, it just comes off as weak to me and gratuitously yanks at our collective heart-strings, in an apparent effort to give a little credibility to what is basically a disaster flick. The same goes with the "nobility" of characters dying with grace, or giving themselves to that others can live. The nobility ends up looking cheap, and rather than the audience respecting the valorous sacrifices, they think "she was stupid not to go on the heliocopter."
The humor, or attempts at humor fell flat as well. They are trying to make light of the end of the world, and you just can't do that. Everyone is going to die! At a school assembly, when Biederman's fellos students are asking him questions, one of them stands up and proclaims that boy is he going to have a lot of sex, famous people have a lot of sex, it's the best part of being famous. There are some shots of his sweetheart giggling and being whispered to by her friends, it was just horrid. The low-point of the humor, however, comes when the astronauts decide that they will give their lives to try to stop the comet. One of them says "well look on the bright side, we'll all get schools named after us." I was in 6th grade when the Challenger exploded. It was the height of Reaganism, an era when on the whole, patriotism thrived, belief in the immortality of America and our way of life was booming, and then this diaster happened. It was something that I found moving. I remember my teacher coming into the room and telling us what had happened...and then setting up a TV and letting us watch it, and it was painful. Those astronauts had schools named after them, of course, and it truly irritates me that they would try to make that into a cheap joke. Maybe no one remembers, maybe the crowd this film was aimed at was too young to remember, but that really was a truly disgusting piece of attempted humor.
The Special effects did the job they were supposed to do, no complaints there. The Tidal wave shots were the high-point of the film. The outer-space scenes were well done as well, although one camera shot from inside the helmets of the astronauts, sounded like an obscene phone-call in surround sound.
There were other things that bothered me...how the film seemed boring, despite the apocalypse, how it seemed everyone in the country watched MSNBC, how Tea Leoni really was wasted in the film, as were most of the other actors (Blair Underwood, Kurtwood Smith, Charles Martin-Smith, and James Cromley.), and how the second nuke attempt isn't even shown...just the President telling us it didn't work. Some of this stuff really distracted me throughout the film.
Overall, the EFX were good, the characters were flat, but likeable, the humor was disastrously horrid, the plot kept the movie going, but I found myself not caring about characters who were dying, I just couldn't buy into supposed human drama, it was too cheap and exploitive for me, and perhaps that kept me from enjoying the film.
Of the $6.75 that I paid for the film, it was worth about $0.50
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