Review of Deep Impact (1998) by Adrian E — 25 Dec 2008

"Heaven and Earth are about to collide.".

Ambitious MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni) stumbles onto the story, prompting a White House press conference. United States President Beck (Morgan Freeman) announces the government's solution: a team of astronauts will travel to the comet and destroy it. The team leader aboard the spaceship Messiah is Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), who was once the last man to walk on the moon. However, the mission fails, splitting off a chunk of the comet, now due to land in the Atlantic with the impact sending a 350-foot tidal wave flooding 650 miles inland, destroying New York and other cities. The larger part of the comet, hitting in Canada, will trigger an E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event), not unlike a "nuclear winter" as dust clouds block out the sun and bring life to an end. President Beck reveals Plan B: a cavernous underground retreat constructed to hold one million Americans, with most to be selected through a national lottery. Since teenage amateur astronomer Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) discovered the comet, his family gets a pass to enter the cave, but his girlfriend Sarah (Leelee Sobieski) and her parents will be left behind. Meanwhile, still in space, Spurgeon Tanner devises a plan for a kamikaze-styled operation that could possibly save the Earth.

Review.

First off, keep in mind that this movie does not pick up for about an hour-and-a-half, and you won't get any serious action sequences until the last 15 minutes of the film. That being said, I wanted to like this movie, and I didn't compare it to Armageddon, but in the end, it was nothing more than a 2-hour waste of my time with a dull, pointless ending. The characters were undeveloped, the story was boring and barely made any sense, and it was quite simply a poorly-made film. I wouldn't even consider this a valiant effort. Way too many sub-plots, too many attempts to be emotional, and just not that good.