Subject: Review: Deep Impact (1998)

From: "Richard Scheib" <[email-masked]>
Date: 8 Aug 1998 16:07:54 GMT

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

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com