Deep Impact
“Deep Impact” has nothing more on its mind than the anatomy of a disaster epic, told through the emotions of a movie-of-the-week. It’s one of the most depressing disaster films of all-time because of the fact that it emphasizes character narratives over action destruction. That’s actually always been why I appreciated Mimi Leder’s film far more than “Armageddon,” which was the bigger hit, and came out later in the week.
Rewatching it, I was struck by how much the emotion, and narrative thrust in the film, is driven by the music. This was James Horner’s first score after he won an Oscar for “Titanic,” and it’s obvious that he was kind of phoning it in after that epic undertaking from a creative standpoint. The musical ideas in this have been heard in plenty of other Horner scores before “Deep Impact,” but they just work here. Leder amplifies it in the hierarchy of the sound mix, and it drives the emotions of the film. It’s a good reminder of why Horner was so great, and what made him great.
The screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin is of very standard genre construction, starting with the identification of the comet before cutting a year to a seemingly unrelated plot thread of a researcher at MSNBC (Jenny Lerner, played by Téa Leoni) tracking down a story of the Secretary of Treasury (played by James Cromwell in a single scene) resigning, only to stumble across a secret that the comet from the beginning is headed for Earth, and the US government, in conjunction with the Russians, have been working on building a rocket, and training a team, to intercept the comet, and blow it up with nuclear warheads. Yeah, this is essentially “Armageddon,” as well. But unlike that Michael Bay editing migraine, we feel as though the film is taking us through a more realistic scenario, timed out more towards a logical time frame rather than having to prep a mission to intercept in 18 days. My God that movie never fails to annoy me in that respect.
My most recent viewing of “Deep Impact” illustrated another key difference between it and “Armageddon” that makes it, for me, stand taller than Bay’s film, and it comes down to the presence of Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck, and Robert Duvall as Spurgeon Tanner, one of the astronauts going on the mission to the comet. These two, elder statesmen bring a gravity and weight to the scenario that allows us to feel like the actions taking place mean something for humanity. In “Armageddon,” there’s a lot of silly humor and dicking around, and doesn’t feel like anyone is truly in charge to reign it in. Whether it’s Freeman on Earth trying to assure a scared nation (he does kind of remind me, in the way he speaks, of Obama), or Duvall being an authoritative presence on the shuttle mission with younger astronauts who were better trained for it (played by Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau, Blair Underwood, Mary McCormack and Aleksandr Baluey), and see him just as a face for PR. These two help make “Deep Impact” believable, even when, in the third act, logic gets a bit loopy.
There are two other key storylines that anchor “Deep Impact” emotionally, or are supposed. The most successful one is Leoni’s, not just as she finds herself as the journalistic voice of the pending apocalypse, but her relationships with her estranged parents (Vanessa Redgrave and Maximillian Schnell); there’s a scene late in the film with Leoni and Redgrave that has some of the most genuine emotion any character shows in this film, and it’s because it shows a character having an authentic character evolution in the movie. The other one is Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski as two high schoolers in love, giving us the requisite love story. Wood is one of the people who first discovered the comet during an astronomy outing, and is now in the spotlight. They’re fine as a romantic anchor, but the older characters have more substantial arcs that help carry this film further than it probably should be.
Mimi Leder’s direction is very meat-and-potatoes; she knows exactly what is required of this film, and she gooses it for as much suspense and tension as she can. It’s a shame that her career didn’t really continue the momentum from this film, because she really has a good knack for delivering white knuckle suspense and action scenes. “Deep Impact” remains a solid watch because of what she does with this film in telling this very basic story.
