Deep Impact

I’ve always had fond memories of this 1998 movie, which suffered by being released in close proximity to the very similar but more traditional action and star-oriented Armageddon. Not to mention that Willis, Affleck and Company had the Muzak Aerosmith hit pop single I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing too but this emphasizes brains over brawn, generally preferable to me.

Deep Impact also sends a nuclear-armed crew out to deflect or destroy the extinction level event meteor headed for Earth but focuses more on how Americans are dealing with the threat of imminent mass death and doesn’t allow a complete esape from disaster. The difference in the movies shouldn’t be surprising once you consider the creative forces behind each: Impact was directed by Mimi Leder (the 1997 George Clooney/Nicole Kidman The Peacemaker and a lot of good TV) and written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin while Armageddon was directed by Michael Bay (The Rock, Bad Boys I and II, Pearl Harbor and the upcoming The Transformers), written by Jonathan Hensleigh, Robert Roy Pool, JJ Abrams, Tony Gilroy and Shane Salerno and, most importantly, produced by Jerry “no explosion is big enough” Bruckenheimer.

Morgan Freeman once again shows why he should have gone into politics in the post-Bush I era, playing a U.S. president able to keep calm and intact in a crisis. Tea Leoni is a journalist who stumbles onto “the biggest story in history” with Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell as her (divorced) parents. Elijah Woods is a teenage astronomy buff who discovers the humongous unrushing disaster with Leelee Sobieski as his neighborhood object of desire. Robert Duvall comes out of retirement (his character was the last man to walk on the moon) to pilot the meteor landing. Good acting all around really helps with many TV stars in small roles including Ron Eldard, Bruce Weitz, Richard Schiff, Mary McCormick, Blair Underwood, Laura Innes, Mark Moses, Denise Crosby, Tucker Smallwood, Concetta Tomei and Kurtwood Smith and a few soon to be movie stars like Jon Favreau and Dougray Scott.

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