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Film Review |
Deep Impact
by Rich Elias, May 7, 1998
This scene serves no purpose except to start the picture with a bang. But
The reporter thinks she's stumbled onto a White House sex scandal (yawn), but rather than let this totally wrong story die in the headlines after a few days, the president decides it's better to tell the entire planet that everybody's doomed. It is sound politics to tell the American people that a comet strike is an Extinction Level Event. Tidal waves will drown us. A mantle of dust blocking the sun will kill off all plant and animal life. Etcetera. The only thing we've got going for us is Robert Duvall. Now, ordinarily, that would be enough for me. I've seen Duvall in great movies (like his "The Apostle"), and also seen him save bad ones. If Duvall could almost bring off Roland Joffe's awful "The Scarlet Letter," I'd be happy to entrust him with the fate of the earth. He plays a senior astronaut in charge of an equal opportunity crew (white, black, Russian, female) half his age. The screenplay by Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin tries for a few minutes of tension as the Generation X astronauts wonder why they're flying with this fossil from the Apollo days. But a round of Budweisers and some straight talk get us past this non-issue onto the next non-issue. Will the comet strike? The movie has to keep us in suspense. But it needs a story to keep us watching until we know for sure whether Life On Earth As We Know It Is Doomed. Tolkin and Rubin craft an Irvin Allen-like ensemble drama ("Towering Inferno", etc.) about characters whose lives are changed by the likelihood of universal annihilation. Leaving aside the possibility that universal annihilation could conceivably kill them, we have psychological baggage to unpack and hence a story. The TV reporter loves her alcoholic mother (Vanessa Redgrave in a cash-the-check performance) and loathes her father (Maximilian Schell, ditto). The prospect of dying concentrates her mind wonderfully. The teen age space gazer (Elijah Wood) is among the privileged selected for survival in a Missouri cave. But his girlfriend isn't so lucky. Unless . . . well, you can connect the dots. Meanwhile, back in outer space, Duvall's mission to blow up the comet makes us wonder why Mimi Leder didn't spend more for special effects. The Messiah floating through space looks as if it flew out of an old 1950s science fiction novel cover painted by Chesley Bonnestall. Also, when Duvall's juvies land on the comet in total darkness (they have to nuke it before sunrise toasts them), we watch them in spacesuits with lights inside the helmets so we can see their faces. Any motorcycle owner can tell you that light inside a helmet makes it impossible to see where you're going. By this point we're looking at our watches, wondering if the last few minutes of "Deep Impact" will compensate for two hours of formula boredom. Duvall and Freeman are worth watching, but their credibility makes everyone else look more phony. Leoni is an embarrassment, but the problem is in a script which would embarrass better actresses. The comet arrives on cue. (I'm not revealing anything which isn't in the previews or TV ads.) As I watched a wall of water topple skyscrapers in New York, my mind returned to an old Susan Sontag essay on science fiction movies, "The Imagination of Disaster": the real pleasure of monster moves, says Sontag, is that deep down we enjoy watching the monster make a mess. Sontag's chief example is the original "Godzilla." The new Godzilla is expected to flatten New York in a few weeks, after the city recovers from being flattened in "Deep Impact" and, presumably, before it's flattened again in "Armageddon." I'll have to re-read her essay before the summer movie season gets any older. I recommend it to you. I don't recommend "Deep Impact."
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