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With "Deep Impact", Hollywood has finally produced a tearjerker-disaster epic. Sure "Titanic" had similar elements, but that was more a doomed love story set on a sinking ship. In "Deep Impact", everything hinges on the impending disaster facing the world. Although the final minutes of the film offer some neat (not great) special effects, they also contain some unabashedly maudlin scenes of heartbreak and sorrow. One wonders exactly who this film was meant for. The strange combination of scribes Bruce Joel Rubin ("Ghost") and Michael Tolkin ("The Player") has resulted in a hybrid script which mixes sci-fi, action and melodrama in one slick, confidently handled package which, nonetheless, seems a little too long for its own good.
Opening with a scene of student astronomer Leo Biderman (Elijah Wood) discovering a comet on a collision course with earth, the film moves at a brisk pace, setting up its numerous melodramatic elements: the eager reporter (Tea Leoni) with a troubled family (Maxmillian Schell as the feckless father, Vanessa Redgrave as the abandoned mother, Rya Kilhstedt as the trophy wife), the stoic President of USA (Morgan Freeman) and his attempts to maintain order amidst chaos, the crusty old astronaut (Robert Duvall) leading a band of hotshots who don't respect him (including Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau and Blair Underwood) on a lifesaving mission to blow up the comet before it impacts the earth. The structure of the film relies on a proven formula: get the audience to care about the people, then eliminate them one by one. What's new, however, is the very obvious way in which director Mimi Leder is striving to milk the tear ducts of the audience - in the screening I was in, there were quite a few weeping women and men.
To her credit, Leder shows a lot of restraint. Her film plays intelligently, sliding only occasionally into tired cliches. She handles her large cast well, eliciting especially fine
performances from Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman and Vanessa Redgrave (then again, Redgrave can act her way out of a high security vault in my opinion). The rest of the cast are crowded into too little story space and aren't given too much to do; James Cromwell appears in only one scene, and Eldard and Favreau's characters are insufficiently developed. Wood is saddled with an undignified and unbelievable plot line involving teen romance. Tea Leoni performs well when she's playing the emotional dynamics of her character, but when she slides into the "reporter" mode, she becomes patently unconvincing and wooden. Laura Innes, however, contributes a particularly nice turn. (At this point, you should also notice how many NBC-related actors there are in this film.)
If some moments of "Deep Impact" fail to engage the viewer, it is because there is too much going on at any given time; the number of concurrent plot lines becomes a little tiring to keep track of after a while, resulting in a diffuse sense of weariness punctuated now and then by moments of tension. For action fans, the amount of blow-up special effects are minimal, and not particularly well done at that. Sci-fi fans will find this angle largely under-exploited. Only those looking for cheap sentimental emotions will be fully satisfied, even though the filmmakers are evidently aiming higher than slush melodrama. Overall, I believe the hype that "Deep Impact" is a lot different from "Armageddon" - I can't believe a Bruce Willis summer flick having as much respect for its audience, nor having as noble aspirations. I just wish that the filmmakers here had fully committed to their ideals and not delivered this wobbly sci-fi-action-melodrama pastiche which though acceptable, is ultimately expendable.