Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Deep Impact (1998)

IMDb plot summary: A comet is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. As doomsday nears, the human race prepares for the worst.
Directed by Mimi Leder. Starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, and Elijah Wood.

Most of my life I just thought of Deep Impact as being “the other asteroid movie that wasn't Armageddon.” And while both films do deal with a celestial object that is on a collision course with the earth for an extinction level event, Armageddon primarily deals with the attempt to dismantle the asteroid, while Deep Impact spends a lot more time on the earth with the people who are actually having to come to terms with the fact that they are in their final days. That to me is a much more compelling story, even if it occasionally is told clumsily here. There are some genuinely thoughtful and well scripted moments where characters realize either they or someone they love is not going to make it into the bunker that will shelter humanity from extinction. And the scenes of destruction and damage to the earth seem a lot more, no pun intended, impactful than they were in Michael Bays’ explosion-happy style. The movie absolutely has clunky points where exposition is awkward and characters have abrupt changes of heart for no real reason, but there are more high points to this one than I expected.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Deep Impact > The Blues Brothers
Deep Impact < The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Deep Impact < Nobody’s Fool
Deep Impact < The Glass Menagerie
Deep Impact < 12 Angry Men (1997)
Deep Impact > David Copperfield (1935)
Deep Impact > 2046
Deep Impact > Connie and Carla
Deep Impact > Hamlet (2000)
Deep Impact > Happythankyoumoreplease
Deep Impact < How I Live Now
Final spot: #1866 out of 3849, or 52%.

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