# Deep Impact (1998)

### reviewed by
Richard Scheib

    DEEP IMPACT

USA. 1998. Director - Mimi Leder, Screenplay - Bruce Joel Rubin & Michael Tolkin, Producers - David Brown & Richard D. Zanuck, Photography - Dietrich Lohmann, Music - James Horner, Visual Effects - Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisors - Scott Farrar & Bill George), Special Effects Supervisor - Michael Lantieri, Production Design - Leslie Dilley. Production Company - Dreamworks SKG/Paramount. Tea Leoni (Jenny Lerner), Robert Duvall (Captain Spurgeon `Fish' Tanner), Elijah Wood (Leo Beiderman), Morgan Freeman (President Beck), Maximilian Schell (Jason Lerner), Ron Eldard (Oren Monash), Vanessa Redgrave (Robin Lerner), Leelee Sobieski (Sarah Hotchner), Mary McCormack (Andrea Baker), Jon Favreau (Gus Partenza), Dougary Scott (Eric Vennekor), Laura Innes (Beth Stanley), James Cromwell (Alan Rittenhouse), Richard Schiff (Don Beiderman), Gary Werntz (Chuck Hotchner), Blair Underwood (Mark Simon), Charles Martin Smith (Marcus Wolf), Denise Crosby (Mrs Hotchner), Betsy Brantley (Ellen Beiderman)

Plot: Investigating what she thinks is a White House sex scandal, a junior tv reporter unwittingly uncovers government plans to avert a comet the size of New York City which is on a collision course with the Earth. As the comet nears, the President launches a manned mission to detonate nuclear warheads and deflect its path while holding a national lottery to select people to be placed in safety in giant underground shelters.

Every year studios seem, either by coincidence or a desire to outdo one another, to hit upon a particular theme all at once - in 1997 it was volcano movies, the year before big budget alien invasion films, and in 1998 it is asteroid/meteor collision films what with this and `Armageddon'. Asteroid/meteor collision films have not fared particularly well in the past - remember `Meteor' (1979) and the dire `Asteroid' mini-series (1997), with only the largely forgotten tv movie `A Fire in the Sky' (1978) having been in any way watchable.

`Deep Impact' starts out giving some hope that it may reverse the trend. The script comes from Bruce Joel Rubin (who made two afterlife fantasies `Ghost' and `Jacob's Ladder' (both 1990) which both inserted some challengingly new ideas into traditional takes on afterlife themes) and Michael Tolkin (who wrote the intriguing `The Rapture' (1991) and the great `The Player' (1992)). The promising opening almost seems a sly dig at contemporary media obsession with Presidential scandal (even though the film was well into production before Monica Lewinsky was propelled from unknown office worker to household name) with a junior tv reporter thinking she has uncovered a juicy piece of White House scandal-mongering but instead finding she has accidentally uncovered plans to try and avert the disaster. This segues into a, if not scientifically believable, at least a quite exciting sequence involving a manned attempt to land on the comet.

And the climax of the film has some really good mass disaster effects sequences. Unfortunately bookended in between them the film falls completely apart. It wants to tell a poignant story about various characters as they meet the impending holocaust but the different dramas it raises - young Elijah Wood's decision to abandon his place in the survival shelter and go back for his girlfriend; Tea Leone's reconciliation with her estranged father after the suicide of her mother; aging shuttle pilot Robert Duvall coming to regard wounded commander Ron Eldard as the son he never had - have a melodramatic insipidity that is infuriating. And despite the film's two-hour length it only ever skates across the surface of these melodramas - for example one would have expected Wood's journey back to his girlfriend to have been one fraught with dramatic perils but all that one sees is him setting out and then just arriving back home. You sort of get the feeling you have wandered into a disaster movie that has been made by people who have watched too much `Barney' - a disaster movie filled with niceness and nobility and where no untoward sentiment ever encroaches. It almost becomes absurd in its saccharine treatment - looting and increased social disorder is mentioned as one of the effects of the impending holocaust but all that one ever sees of any of this is a big traffic jam on the highway; Vanessa Redgrave commits suicide but the film seems to almost deliberately avoid any mention of the actual words, it all takes place off-screen and is only ever alluded to. After the maddening banality of `Deep Impact', all that `Armageddon' really needed to do to become the better of 1998's two asteroid movies was simply to turn up.

(I don't know if it is just my perverted mind or what but for some reason whenever I heard the title of the film it kept making me think more of a 1970s porn film than a mega-budget disaster spectacle. You know:- "She couldn't find sexual satisfaction until she met Joe and discovered fourteen inches ... of `Deep Impact'.")

    Reviewed by Richard Scheib

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