Deep Impact (1998)
Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, Tea Leoni, Robert Duvall, Elijah Wood
Director: Mimi Leder
Synopsis: Meteor heading for Earth disaster flick given "sensitive" treatment.
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

The summer of 1998 witnessed one of Hollywood's more curious box-office battles. Two asteroid disaster movies collided head-on with a giant radioactive lizard, while somebody called Mary quietly walked away with the year's biggest box-office prize. Deep Impact arrived a couple of months ahead of Disney's gargantuan Armageddon, tackling much the same premise but from an altogether different angle. Where Michael Bay's film embraced bombast and pyrotechnics, Deep Impact opted for a softer, more humane and bittersweet approach that positively reeks of the well-meaning sentiment so often associated with productions bearing Steven Spielberg's influence.

The film is largely rescued from descending into complete idiocy and unrestrained melodrama by another magnificent performance from Morgan Freeman as the President of the United States. His calm authority lends the proceedings a welcome air of credibility and dignity, towering above what is essentially a rather mushy disaster movie that wisely saves its expensive visual effects until the closing stages, choosing instead to concentrate on the emotional repercussions of impending annihilation for what appears to be predominantly middle-class America.

Whether that approach succeeds will largely depend on your tolerance for unabashed sentimentality. You can either surrender to the film's emotional manipulation or find yourself rolling your eyes as Vanessa Redgrave delivers one heartfelt speech after another and families bid tearful farewells in scene after scene designed to produce that inevitable lump in the throat. There is an unmistakable feminine touch to the material, which perhaps comes as no surprise given that the director is Mimi Leder, who had already earned an enviable reputation through her work on the hugely successful television series ER. She directs with confidence and warmth, but occasionally allows the film to become just a little too gooey for its own good.

Fortunately, the patience required to endure all the soul-searching is rewarded by an undeniably spectacular finale. The enormous tidal wave that engulfs New York—still Hollywood's favourite city to destroy—remains an impressive piece of visual effects work, even if the CGI has inevitably dated. It provides the sense of scale that the rest of the film deliberately holds back, and delivers the kind of spectacle audiences had been waiting for all along.

Deep Impact is polished, handsomely produced and consistently well acted, even if the wonderfully named Sturgeon "Fish" Tanner occasionally strays into caricature. It may not possess the delirious entertainment value of Armageddon, which at least embraced its own absurdity with gusto, but it is unquestionably the better-made film.

Both pictures proved enormous commercial successes and ensured that the summer of 1998 belonged to asteroids. Sadly, it was also a year that, despite all the box-office fireworks, remains rather short on truly memorable cinema.