Movie Reviews

Deep Impact

20 Jun 1998

Deep Impact was inevitable this year.

It's about the end of the world, a big event like no other. Hollywood is going through another cycle of "big" movies, mainly about disasters. Moreover, 1999 (a historically favoured year for armageddon) is just a few months away.

Therefore, the making of Deep Impact was as unstoppable as the comet which, in the film, threatens to wipe out humanity. Deep Impact is a Big Movie, with nifty special effects, that shows every cent of its substantial budget. As usual with such a film, it has a written-by-numbers script, with written-by-numbers characters. What more is needed?

Happily, it is Big in other ways. Rather than focus on just a few people, which would be crazy for an event of this magnitude, it gives us a large cast. So large, in fact, that the characters of the three top-billed actors (Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni and Elijah Wood) never actually meet. Yes, it's that Big.

On one level, it works fine. Director Mimi Leader (The Peacemaker) is a talented action director. Her lack of subtlety is ideal for Hollywood. She also manages to get some cheap tears from many of the emotional moments, particularly Leoni's final goodbye to her father (Maximilian Schell).

The cast is generally very good, unsurprising considering some of the names. Along with the aforementioned, Morgan Freeman (as the President) and Vanessa Redgrave add their weight. Quite simply, the movie is not just a whammo destruction thriller...

Which is the main problem. It attempts to be a mature, personal story about facing the end, rather like the spooky On the Beach (1959). But however Big it is, a two-hour movie can only begin to explore the world on the brink of armageddon. This is one subject that dwarfs even Hollywood. In the end, it is strangely unsatisfying.

Without revealing too much, the large script-writing team (only three are credited) know enough scientific mumbo-jumbo between them to ensure that someone comes up with an ingenious plan and at least some of the world is actually saved.

Fortunately, while New York and Washington are destroyed, Australia comes up trumps. A triumph for the economy!