Extinction Level Event

During the summer movie season of 1998, there were two high-budget films dealing with our planet coming under siege from large space rocks. One of them was the much-touted ARMAGEDDON with Bruce Willis. The other was the more modest but still visually spectacular DEEP IMPACT, released by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Pictures. Although ARMAGEDDON came out slightly ahead in the box office race, DEEP IMPACT didn't fare too badly either. In terms of story quality and acting, DEEP IMPACT fares better because it focuses as much on the human interest stories as it does on the situation itself, even if some of that human interest is done in a somewhat labored way.

The film begins with the discovery of a 7 1/2 mile-wide comet by an astronomer (Charles Martin Smith) working at an observatory in the mountains near Tucson, Arizona. He computes the course it's going to take; and to his horror, indications are that it will intercept the Earth within two years. Although Smith is soon killed thereafter in an accident, his discovery is shared with a young protege (Elijah Wood); and when the existence of that comet is revealed by the President (Morgan Freeman), it is named for both of them ([Marcus] Wolf-[Leo] Biederman). Freeman also announces a joint US-Russian space mission that will intercept the comet, drill nuclear bombs into it, and bump it off its collision course with the planet.

This team, led by Robert Duvall and Mary McCormack, manages to accomplish some of what it had intended to do, but not enough, and not before one of their fellow crew members is lost due to the explosive outgassing that happens as the sun strikes the comet's icy surface. Now, there are two comets: the smaller one is 1 1/2 miles wide, the other over five miles wide. Both comets are still headed for Earth, and there is no word as to whether Duvall's crew is even still alive. Freeman then announces the existence of a huge complex of caves in the limestone cliffs of Missouri that will shelter one million people for the two years it will take for the dust to settle from the comet's impact.

While all this is going on, two major human interest stories are developing. Wood and a precocious astronomy classmate of his (Leelee Sobieski) get married so that both their families can go to the "Ark" in Missouri; but due to bureaucratic mix-ups, that plan doesn't work out. Elsewhere, an ambitious TV news reporter (Tea Leoni) who wants (and gets) in on this monstrous story has to somehow try and mend fences with her estranged father (Maximillian Schell). Both story tracts will come together on the day the comets are less than twelve hours away.

But good news of sorts arrives: Duvall reports that he and his crew are okay, and that they have one plan to stop the larger of the two comets. The arming codes for the four remaining nukes are armed so the Duvall can fly the spacecraft into a vent caused by the outgassing in the large rock. The smaller of the two comets slams into the Atlantic, creating a devastating tsunami; but although he and his crew sacrifice themselves, their plan to save humanity works, destroying the bigger one into a million smaller pieces.

Owing an uncredited debt to Arthur C. Clarke and his similarly-themed story "The Hammer Of God" (Clarke being a Spielberg favorite, thanks to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), DEEP IMPACT may not be the best, or even the most profound, of science fiction films, but its evenly handled combination of visual spectacle and human interest make it one of the most compelling. There is, it must be admitted, a bit of melodrama involving Wood and Sobieski, and Leoni and Schell; but in the main, most of the cliches that were so common in the disaster films of the 70s are held in check by director Mimi Leder (THE PEACEMAKER) and screenwriters Michael Tolkin (THE PLAYER) and Bruce Joel Rubin (GHOST). Freeman, unsurprisingly, makes for a very convincing President; and Duvall is once again at his excellent best. The visual effects work of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic crew is once more some of the best seen on film in quite some time; and James Horner, whose musical expertise graced AN AMERICAN TAIL, TITANIC, and APOLLO 13, comes up with another suitably dramatic and poignant score here.

Even though it is slightly imperfect, DEEP IMPACT is much more of a human interest story than the testosterone-laden ARMAGEDDON, and that's what makes it such a memorable, worthwhile, and dramatic addition to the sci-fi genre. For a combination of realism and human interest, one can't go wrong with this movie.