Blockbuster season has officially arrived on the tails of this comet flick which kicks the season off with a sense of flair. The second weekend of May has in recent years become quite a lucrative spot in the summer action bonanza (read "Twister" and "The Fifth Element"). With considerable flair and a great trailer, "Deep Impact" will undoubtedly uphold the tradition and try to make as much money as it can before "Armageddon" and "Godzilla" trample into a theater near you.
The good news is that this movie isn't that bad. It's actually pretty fun. Directed by Mimi Leder ("The Peacemaker"), it's exciting, moving and sometimes even funny. The special effects are great and the acting is fairly strong as well.
The very talented roster includes Tea Leoni as an MSNBC journalist, Robert Duvall as an aging astronaut and Morgan Freeman as the President of the United States. Also rounding out the cast are Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell and Elijah Wood. They are a few out of a large pool of characters that face death at some time during this film.
The movie starts off with a dopey kid named Leo Biederman (Wood) discovering what could be a new star. It actually turns out to be a comet, and when an astronomer in Arizona discovers that its trajectory conflicts with Earth's orbit, all hell breaks out. Actually, before that happens, a run in with a swerving truck sends the astronomer and his jeep off the side of a cliff in a fairly irrelevant opening sequence.
A year later, Jenny Lerner (played nicely by the always beautiful and elegant Leoni) has a scoop about a recently resigned politician's mistress. Jenny thinks her name is Elly. But it's actually E.L.E., which stands for Extinction Level Event, and there is no mistress, just a comet speeding towards Earth.
The President must call an emergency press conference and we learn that a special group of astronauts led by Spurgeon Tanner (Duvall) are being sent into outer-space to annihilate the comets with a bunch of nukes. He also declares that the United States will be from that point on under martial law.
Later, we find out that a bunker has been built in Missouri which can house one million people, 800,000 of which will be randomly selected in a national lottery while the rest have been preselected. In addition, no one over 50 will be allowed in.
There's a lot here to deal with in this film, and I'm pretty surprised that it only barely goes over the two hour mark. Many movies could be made from this script. Perhaps if Leder wasn't aiming for a blockbuster, she could have done a darker and more disturbing film on the implications of having a national lottery and martial law. Such a film could examine human behavior under duress on a personal and political scale. That's not really here, and, if it were, it might have given the film a deeper impact, pardon the pun.
Still, as a blockbuster there's lots of good stuff to go around. The depiction of the comet, both up close, on the surface and from afar, is really quite a sight. As for the notorious tidal wave that appears in all the commercials, that too, while only on screen for a brief amount of time, is exhilarating to watch.
The movie's main failure is overextending itself with a corny and utterly annoying storyline involving Biederman and his girlfriend, Sarah (Leelee Sobieski), who looks an awful lot like Helen Hunt. Wood seems to be setting a record for playing virtuous space-cadets ("The Ice Storm"), and here his character is completely irritating, especially when Sarah gets involved.
This subplot is intended to bring an element of romance into the picture, but instead it merely discredits the film by displaying unrealistic human emotions and powers. As a result, the Biederman story arouses more unintentional laughter than any other part of the film.
Luckily, Redgrave picks up the slack by infusing her small role as Jenny's mother with wit, poignancy and sophistication. She is completely engaging in the role as well as Freeman who is wildly underutilized, simply serving as a dictator of vital comet information. No one really knows anything about him or his family.
There's also Duvall who seems very much at home as the veteran astronaut. He works very well with his fellow astronaut actors, all of whom provide an emotional moment late in the film.
Also there's a bittersweet element of surprise in who lives and who dies. In what may be termed as a bold move, several likable and central characters do not survive this movie (as opposed to "Independence Day"). Perhaps the most powerful image in the film is that of two people bracing and saying their goodbyes on a beach while a 100 foot tidal wave towers above them. Leder deserves credit for acknowledging to some extent that good people die too. In that way, the inherent tragedy of the mass death in "Deep Impact" is felt more than, say "Volcano."
This movie has a lot of ground to cover, and as a result some of the characters and events are seen in only a superficial light, but nevertheless it all pretty much works. Exciting moments are exciting, sad moments are sad and happy moments are happy. And sometimes that's all that you really need.
