# Deep Impact (1998)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

The geeky astronomer enters figures into a computer and blanches when he sees the result. Surely it must be serious since it causes him to toss the pizza slice he's eating back into the box, an event underscored by a burst of menacing music.

Heavens above, it turns out we poor earthlings are about to be squished by a comet the size of New York!

Does President Beck (Morgan Freeman) have a plan?

      Will anyone survive?

And, most importantly, will struggling reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) get to be the MSNBC anchor person during Armageddon?

These and many other burning questions arise during the course of ``Deep Impact,'' an end-of-the-world scenario that is alternately silly, sensational and soapy. But it's rarely moving, although the screenplay by Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin does everything but dice onions in an attempt to jerk tears. Somehow though, when the curtain is coming down on life as we know it, it's hard to fret about whether or not Jenny will make peace with her frosty father (Maximillian Schell) or what will become of teen star-gazer Leo Beiderman (Elijah Wood) and his girlfriend Sarah (Leelee Sobieski). Not helping matters is the fact that Leo comes off as irritatingly earnest, partially due to the script requirements, mostly because of Wood's one-note performance.

Leoni's intrepid newscaster looks practically paralyzed once she gets on the air, reading bulletins in a thin, wavering voice that would inspire millions to reach for their remotes.

Obviously inspired by the 1951 sci-fi classic ``When Worlds Collide'' - with elements of ``On The Beach'' thrown in - ``Deep Impact'' takes a thought-provoking premise and submerges it in suds.

While President Beck sputters sanctimony (``You will still pay your bills,'' he warns), a crew of astronauts led by veteran rocket-jockey Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall) takes off on a mission to blow up the threatening comet. Everyone involved in this endeavor has his or her own family troubles to contend with, and, added to Jenny and Leo's woes, these subplots send the film's syrup content to toxic levels.

Disaster movies by nature are overwrought, but they shouldn't be as consistently absurd as this. For example, Sarah's doomed mom hands off her newborn to Sarah, who hops on a motorcycle with the infant, leaving without a single diaper or bottle of formula.

Somehow, no one in the Capitol seems to know about the billions of dollars being secretly diverted into the construction of the world's largest spaceship. And though everyone seems to know weeks beforehand that the comet's impact will create a tidal wave that will drown the East Coast, it appears there's no evacuation plan proposed.

Director Mimi Leder seems clueless when it comes to staging sentimental scenes, but she does have the proper touch for the movie's few suspenseful patches, such as the truly scary sequences with Ron Eldard and company racing against time to plant nuclear ``moles'' on the comet's surface.

The scenes of cataclysmic catastrophe in the last 10 minutes also are impressive and sometimes even imaginative. The image of the head of the Statue of Liberty floating through the flooded streets of Manhattan is particularly eerie.

If only the filmmakers had stripped away the saccharine and the self-importance of ``Deep Impact'' they might have found the kind of haunting epic they're trying so hard to create. Instead they've cooked up a crockful of hard-to-swallow melodrama, full of urgent weddings and quickie family reunions. It would have been much more fun to drop in on the folks who elected to party like it's never gonna be 1999.

    James Sanford

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