Paramount and Dreamworks Pictures, Rated PG-13
Directed by Mimi Leder
Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin
You've really gotta admire a big-budget summer movie that's not all effects and no character development. "Deep Impact" is a pleasant surprise to start off the summer movie season. Hang on, folks, because I have a feeling that for the most part, it's all downhill from here. As I said before, it is a pleasant surprise, but it's still far from perfect. This film is modeled very much after the disaster flicks of the '70s, relying on an ensemble of characters, without one true central character. However, Téa Leoni does seem to get the majority of screen time, especially in the first half of the film. She plays an up-and-coming reporter with MSNBC, a network's that's used almost as much as CNN was in "Contact," but at least in that movie, the network's importance wasn't quite as overestimated. Anyhoo, Leoni's character Jenny Lerner stumbles upon a possible scandal that goes all the way to the White House. She soon finds out that what's being hushed up isn't a scandal but a comet on a collision course with earth. When the news is broken to the public, the president (Morgan Freeman) announces that a crew of four astronauts and a cosmonaut (led by Robert Duvall in the film's best performance) are going to be sent out to rendezvous with the comet and try to stop it. Since this takes place an hour into the film, it's a given that they're going to fail, and the comet will still be headed towards earth. It turns out that two comets are now on their way and a lottery is to be drawn to determine who avoids oblivion by going into some underground caves that have been constructed in this case. Leoni has since been made an anchorwoman and helps the nation deal with the crisis on MSNBC (where Brian Williams is during all this is beyond me). Here is where her acting falls flat. No anchor person would ever be as wooden as she is, and when she's not behind the anchor desk later, she's only slightly better, but she's now sharing the spotlight with Duvall, Freeman (who does the most he can in a role that doesn't give him a lot to do), and Elijah Wood who plays a teenager who discovered the comet and decides to marry his high school sweetheart (Leelee Sobieski, who will be first on the list to play Helen Hunt as a teenager if need be) to save her and her family's lives, since he's been chosen to go to one of the caves. Vanessa Redgrave also has a small role as Jenny's mother, showing how those over 50 who are ineligible for the caves deal with it, as does Maximilian Schell as her estranged father. There are a lot of little things here that don't make sense and a few plot points are unclear or abandoned. One that I really found unbelievable was all of Times Square coming to a stop. Trust me, even if the world was going to end, that would never happen. Still, many other little moments make this movie, such as a great montage showing the wedding of the two teens, the president, and Jenny's mother, and a truly gripping sequence of the astronauts trying to get off of the comet while the sun is rising. The climax is somewhat disappointing, and the special effects range from perfect to awful. Yet the heart of this movie is in the right place (I even had a lump in my throat in a few instances) and with a few changes, it could've been an outstanding film, which is much more than I think I'll be able to say about many of the coming summer flicks. ***
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