I took my nine-year-old son with me to see Deep Impact, the first of this summer's two comet-on-a-collision-course-with-earth movies. (The second, which theaters threaten to release on July 1, is the Bruce Willis flick, Armageddon.) Driving home, my son said, abruptly, "You know, dad, that wasn't a very good movie."
I asked him why, and he said, "In real life, that boy and girl wouldn't have made it away safely," and went on to talk about a scene in which characters played by Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski flee on a dirt bike from an on-rushing thousand-foot wall of water sent racing across the eastern seaboard when a piece of the meteor smashes into the Atlantic. My son said, "They were only going 50 miles an hour, but the water was going 300 miles an hour. It would have caught them in real life."
Now, I'll be the first to acknowledge that my son is exceptionally bright, and take a good deal of the credit for that, but it's also a sad commentary on a major studio release that features a cast of some of our greatest film performers (Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Maximilian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave), but which fails to earn the willing suspension of disbelief of someone still six weeks shy of ten years old.
Yes, surprise: Hollywood has given us yet another film for which it spent megabucks on special effects but apparently only 46 cents for the script.
The plot (if you really want to know) centers on a newly discovered comet that's on course to hit the earth, resulting in an Extinction Level Event (E.L.E.). For some months, the government hides the truth, until an ambitious TV reporter (Tea Leoni) starts looking into the abrupt resignation by the Secretary of Defense; she believes he was forced to quit after having an affair with someone named Ellie, about whom he held secret conversations on a private phone line. But it's not "Ellie" he's been talking about, but "E.L.E." Once she learns the secret, the president (Freeman) decides to go public with the plans the country has undertaken to deal with the threatened disaster. First, to launch a space mission under the command of a crusty retired astronaut (Duvall), which will try to nuke the comet. If that fails, plan B calls for a national lottery in which 1 million Americans will win places in fully outfitted shelters, where they will live out the two-year deep winter that will result when the debris from the comet's impact blots out the sun.
There are a lot of reasons the film doesn't work, aside from its disregard for physics in the scene in which Wood and Sobieski flee the rushing water. One, it's too familiar, straight out of the end-of-the-world pictures of the 1950s, you know the ones that finished with the words "The Beginning" flashing on the screen after the final scene. (This one ends with Freeman making a speech that concludes, "It's time to begin.") Two, the focus is not sharp — like many of the disaster pics of the 1970s, this one features an ensemble cast of big and near-big stars and the film moves from one story to the next throughout. The problem with this is that it tends to diffuse the effect in any particular scene. Three, the film can't seem to make up its mind whether it's an action flick, or a movie about Important Human Emotions, as it also includes several domestic story lines, including one in which Leoni's character deals with her anger with her father for leaving her mother for a much younger woman.
That the script doesn't work is surprising, since the two writers have sterling resumes: one is Michael Tolkin, (The Player), and the other was Bruce Joel Rubin (the Oscar-winning Ghost). But perhaps the reason the script doesn't work is that their best work is not in the action/SF genre, and they tried to write a script that was too thoughtful and intelligent, and when you're strapped in for the kind of roller coaster ride a good action pic can give us, you don't want to think about how the wheels stay on the track through all the dips and turns, and you don't want to listen to speeches about how smart the engineers were who designed the roller coaster, you just want to ride and scream your head off.
In the lobby of the theater where we went to see Deep Impact was a promotional sign for Armageddon, one with a digital read-out that counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the film opens.
If Deep Impact is an example of the kind of movie in store for us on 7.1.98, then we appreciate the warning.
We'll seek shelter.
by Joe Schuster
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