Subject: Review: Deep Impact (1998)

From: Seth Bookey <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Jun 1998 04:11:24 GMT

Deep Impact (1998)
                                      
Seen on 14 June 1998 by myself for $5.50 at the SONY Loews Showplace

I am a real sucker. I cried at this movie. But remember that I cry during
everything. If children die, parents die, dogs or cats die, if any of them
come back from the other world to haunt and love you, if someone knows
they are dying and are having a final farewell, if something selfless and
devoted happens, I am there with Kleenex (TM). Heck, I cried during the
McDonalds commercial when they make that retarded kid they hired feel
important because they let him work there. So I am a big mushpot, okay? I
love a good movie and a good cry and it's nice when they coincide but they
can be mutually exclusive. Read on...

*Deep Impact* knows exactly how to manipulate the emotions. This is
essential since there is a variety of problems with the screenplay. The
first problem is that there are too many characters. The magic is that
they are able to manipulate a great deal of them into emotional situations
that an extinction-level event like a meteor hitting Western Canada will
bring.

Unfortunately, the main reason people go to these movies is to see the
destruction and the special effects, so the movie's best scenes appear in
commercials and the surprises are at a minimum. For example, the whole
beginning of the movie could have had more impact (no pun intended) if
they took the tack of MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) stumbling
onto something big first, and then showed the comet's discovery in
flashback.

So, we all know a huge comet is coming toward Earth. Luckily, President
Beck (Morgan Freeman) is hopeful that the big spaceship Messiah headed by
Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner (Robert Duvall) will be able to implant nuclear
warheads in the moving meteor by landing on it (sound pretty impossible,
eh?). His backup plan is "The Ark"--a huge cave that will house the best
minds in America (Europe apparently is on another planet) and people
selected by lottery. [The real sci-fi aspect is this: How did a black man
get elected to the Presidency in the present time? I don't expect to see
that in my own lifetime, and I'm a young liberal!] It's set in the
present, and being an anti-senior nation, no one older than 50 is allowed in
the tunnel. This poses a problem to Jenny, as her mother is played by
Vanessa Redgrave--a national treasure, for God's sake! It's an outrage!
Didn't anyone see Julia? Are we still mad about her PLO affections?
Someone should have made an exception. This country was built on making
exceptions.

Known for her work on the TV series *ER*, director Mimi Leder does a
pretty good job with a panoramic script that calls for nationalistic space
heroics involving an astronaut crew and their families, a teenage love
story and their two families, the reporter and her divorced parents and
all her coworkers, and a President who's married to a family we never
actually see and all the President's men. There is just way too much going
on here. Her successes, however, are the emotional tearjerker scenes, and
the scenes involving tension, as seen in the two space missions. These
required good direction and editing.

The actors do a pretty good job. Redgrave and Duvall are excellent as
always. Leoni is pretty good as well, considering this is her first lead
role in a summer blockbuster. Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski are good as
the teenage lovers, considering how little that story was shown. 

Two more problems: The movie is a commercial for NBC and MSNBC. Those
logos are throughout the film. Stars from *ER* and NBC--Ron Eldard and
Blair Underwood as two of the astronauts, and Laura Innes as Beth Stanley
are here also. The other problem is that the special effects are not all
that great. It's about two steps up from NRA Chairman Charlton Heston
parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments from the 1950s. Plus, knowing
a comet is heading to the Atlantic, why was anyone in NYC, much less
sitting leisurely reading a paper in Washington Square Park. I guess it's
more fun to destroy New York City when you get to see New Yorkers hurt
also. The only thing missing was a woman absentmindedly walking her baby
in a pram across Broadway while the tsunami wave is bearing down on her.

*Deep Impact* is best seen trapped in the theatre, in the full grasp of
it's manipulation. You'll laugh (unintentionally), you'll cry, you'll see
New York destroyed (again). Just try to pay less than full price.

Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin. At least that's what they
called it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 1998, Seth J. Bookey, New York, NY 10021
[email-masked]; http://www.panix.com/~sethbook

More movie reviews by Seth Bookey, with graphics, can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2679/kino.html