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 Deep Impact Dir: Mimi Leder Stars: Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman. Chalk up the first major disappointment of the summer movie season. Of the two earth-shattering asteroid movies to be released this summer, I had the highest hopes for Deep Impact. Where the advance on Armageddon seemed to suggest mindless action, Deep Impact seemed to promise more of an actual story. Instead of just going out to blow the thing up, government scientists were fairly sure it was going to hit no matter what they did. The governments of different countries had taken precautions to save about one million people from each population, to stay in deep caves for two years until the dust settled. Imagine the stories that could come of that - the individual struggles and the epic story of a species fighting for survival. Then imagine all of that swept aside for a bunch of shallow stories about characters the audience has little personal investment in and a lot of special effects of the asteroid in space and mass destruction. That's Deep Impact. It was anything but deep, and has little impact. From the very beginning, something wasn't right. A high school kid finds a star that's not supposed to be there, a local scientist figures out what it is, and promptly dies. This would be of some importance if he was the only one with the information, but it turns out he's not. The government finds out somehow anyway. Maybe the actor playing the scientist demanded too much money? The sloppy beginning begets a sloppy middle and a sloppy ending. Reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) uncovers the government is hiding a secret and forces their hand. They have to make their announcement earlier, which adds to Lerner's bad day because her father just married some waifish young tart while her mother pines away for anything new in her life. Lerner's career busts wide open after she breaks the news, but the world is in a panic. And that's when a slew of other characters stumble into the story. We get the crew of the space shuttle mission "Messiah," led by Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), trying to blow up the asteroid before it hits. We get the kid who first discovered the comet, his family, and their friends. We get the President Beck (Morgan Freeman) and his staff. Briefly, we even get the ground crew at NASA. Each one of these little pockets of characters has a full story to tell, but none are really developed. They are there to serve their plot function and leave - no more, no less. The President orders every possible action to be taken to save the Earth, including sending nuclear missiles to intercept the comet. Meanwhile, the Earth plunges into hysteria. Not that we really get to see much of that. We're shown short news clips of riots and then deserted, garbage-filled streets. It's typical of this movie. Each successive action doesn't build on the previous action, and none of the characters connect. To be done properly and capture what the Deep Impact crew had hoped for, this movie probably should have been a mini-series, lasting five or six hours. There are simply too many stories, and too little time to tell them in. So what you're left with is the frame of what could have been a great movie. Maybe Armageddon will drop the pretense of a story, at least, and just blow a lot of stuff up. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. -Nick Scenes from the movie: Jenny Lerner (Leoni) looks as concerned as a TV journalist can look. Spurgeon Tanner (Duvall) pilots this ship of fools. |
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