The Chelyabinsk meteor tickled me to pieces. Whereas the news had been mirroring dystopic fiction all too often lately, it was a relief to see it mirror doomsday fiction for a change. The event reminded me I had somehow never finished Deep Impact, which I had only seen portions of whenever I was channel surfing. Frankly, the film appeared to be a bore, but where else am I going to find sweet space rock action?
In the interest of transparency: I generally dislike Hollywood disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Earthquake, Twister, The Core, Volcano, Dante’s Peak—all of these productions feel as disastrous as the literal disasters they depict. All you need to make a disaster movie is a weak understanding of natural occurrences, a bunch of technobabble, a handful of crumbling landmarks, and gooey melodrama liberally garnished with hundreds of extras racing down city streets. Other than the visual effects, the genre has not improved at all in nearly fifty years.
In the beginning of Deep Impact, a young boy (Elijah Wood) spots a new object in the sky with a store-bought telescope. Even though the scene reeks of dishonesty, it’s kinda accurate in the sense amateur astronomers still make important contributions to this day. His astronomy club submits the finding to a full-fledged observatory where a stereotypical movie scientist keys the coordinates into his computer and realizes the object is barreling towards our planet. That alone would be exciting, but somehow it leads to a cliff-side car wreck that has the scientist’s vehicle exploding in a Hollywood fireball—in midair no less.
A year later, an investigative reporter played by Téa Leoni thinks she’s gotten the scoop on the Secretary of the Treasury’s mistress, a woman she says is named Ellie. She soon finds out that she misheard “E.L.E.,” which stands for “extinction level event.” Yes, I know the government can be pretty incompetent at times, but that’s like using the code name “U.F.O.” to cover up flying saucers. The President (Morgan Freeman) personally asks the reporter to sit on the scoop until he can announce the news himself. In typical Leoni fashion, she merely shrugs and says, “Okay.”
Two days later, The President reveals to the world that a comet is on a collision course with Earth. He freezes national wages and product prices to prevent profiteering and panic. Then he reveals the plan: scientists are already working on a manned mission that will attempt to destroy the comet with nuclear weaponry. The senior astronaut on the mission, played by Robert Duvall, was the last person to step foot on the moon. The younger astronauts resent him, which is the dumbest thing in the entire movie. I’ll give you a shiny nickel if you can name one person who had the wherewithal to complete astronaut training who doesn’t idolize any of the dozen men who walked on the moon; in Deep Impact, astronauts have the emotional intelligence of high school jocks.
As the ship makes its way to rendezvous with the comet, Leoni’s unbelievable reporter is promoted to an even more unbelievable news anchor. I know some news personalities are known for being a little stiff, but Leoni’s performance could make robots wince. It’s a shame the Earth drama is so hackneyed because the space stuff is excellent. Yes, there’s sound where there should be none and much of the suspense was ruined by the marketing, which clearly spoiled that the mission fails and the comet indeed strikes the planet, but if the space bits had been the entire movie, it could have been a great one.
Predictability aside, the second half is much better than the first. Lesser films show civilization devolving into mass hysteria when faced with possible extinction. Though it’s refreshing that Deep Impact bucks the trend, its characters can still hail a cab within seconds of raising a hand. I’d say maybe society is doing a little too well, all things considered.
Later on, the reporter’s mother says she feels relieved she won’t survive the impact. She even quit smoking and donated some of her more valuable belongings to the government’s effort to preserve antiquities. This was the sole scene which unexpectedly moved me. A lot of armchair philosophers love to talk about how shitty humanity is, but if we were all that bad, we never would have civilized in the first place. This is exactly the stuff I wish more disaster movies had.
Deep Impact is a bit like a newborn calf. There’s a lot of wobbling in the beginning, but eventually it learns to walk… sort of. It’s one of the better disaster movies, but that’s not saying much. If, like me, you found a strong interest in what happened in Russia recently, you should give it a shot.
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