Release Date: May 8, 1998
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, James Cromwell, Mary McCormack
Directed by: Mimi Leder
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense disaster-related elements, brief language)
In 1997, it was impossible to mention the movie Dante's Peak without talking about Volcano shortly thereafter. The case might be much the same for 1998, when movie going audiences will be subjected to the "twin-vision" releases of Deep Impact and later this year's Armageddon. From the release of the previews, it was obvious that the filmmakers involved were sending their asteroid-threatens-Earth tales in different directions. Deep Impact, by far the more character-oriented tale of the two, loses a lot of the momentum it might've had by struggling through a muddled storyline; if anything, this cost it any chance it had to outdo Armageddon.
Usually, for disaster event movies, the plot begins a reasonable amount of time prior to the cork-popping (whether that's a volcano exploding or aliens attacking a la Independence Day). Here, however, storytellers Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin begin the movie a great deal of time - almost a year, in terms of the movie's scope - before the event and lead up to the two most exciting parts in the movie with convoluted storylines. This lack of plot sense does not inspire confidence, and soon the viewers are left to do nothing but anticipate the moment of impact (which, thankfully, does arrive).
Deep Impact is really three stories in one, all of them mostly independent but all of them connected by the common threat of the asteroid's imminent collision with Earth. The first is of Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood), a kid astronomer who first notes the asteroid almost a year prior to its collision with Earth; the second is of Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni), an ambitious reporter for MSNBC who discovers the government's contingency plans a few weeks before they become public knowledge; and the third is of Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), a seasoned veteran of an astronaut who must lead a team to land on the asteroid's surface and blow the rock apart with two nuclear bombs.
The movie, for all its intricacy, would've made a better book than a movie. Because there are three main plots, and several other minor ones that give relationship, the movie ends up being much less solid then hoped for. Directed by Mimi Leder, it has the same helter-skelter feel of her last action thriller, The Peacemaker. Here, however, her pacing is worse: the plot lends itself to two incredible scenes of exciting visuals strung together by lulled plot points for an even 120 minutes. For all its worth as an "event" movie, Deep Impact may be wide of the mark, and in two months' time, we'll hope for Armageddon to fill the void.
all contents © 1998 Craig Roush