This first of two summer blockbusters pitting Earth against a celestial
wrecking ball is a three-hankie weeper in disaster-movie drag, and its
tear-jerking bull's-eyes are separated by long stretches of tedium.
Rising young reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) goes looking for a
White House sex scandal and finds instead that the government has
been sitting on the information that there's a massive comet on a
collision course with Earth.
Jenny's career skyrockets as her
relationship with her parents crumbles: Her father (Maximilian Schell)
has just married a woman half his age, while her mother (Vanessa
Redgrave) hides despair beneath a brittle facade of gaiety.
A team
headed up by aging astronaut Spurgen Tanner (Robert Duvall) is
dispatched to nuke the comet, but when the portentously named
Messiah mission fails, the President (Morgan Freeman) declares
martial law and initiates the "Ark" lottery, which will decide who will
live (in a DR. STRANGELOVE-esque underground cave complex)
and who will die.
It's a nice change of pace that the focus here is the
human impact of impending mass destruction, rather than the
testosterone-drenched mechanics of kicking wayward comet tail. But
most of the individuals singled out for their own storylines aren't
terrifically interesting.
By far the dullest are adolescent astronomer
Leo (Elijah Wood) and his gal Sarah (Leelee Sobieski), whose puppy
love is put to the ultimate test when his family is chosen and hers
isn't.
Leoni has TV-babe looks but none of the breezy authority that
makes successful on-air personalities, and whenever she has a scene
with Redgrave you can only wonder how a woman so vibrant and
multifaceted produced such a brittle, shallow daughter.
As to the
Messiah crew, it's a good thing they're cast with an eye to ethnic and
gender diversity because otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell them
apart.