Deep Impact

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This could have been so very much better had director Mimi Leder focussed on creating either a decent science fiction film or an extinction event family drama, rather than this messy hybrid with too many slushy emotional sub plots. Téa Leoni is a television journalist assigned to investigate the resignation of a senior US Government official (James Cromwell) during which she discovers that a comet discovered a year earlier is on a collision course with Earth. President Morgan Freeman convinces her to hold off on broadcasting the story whilst they finalise their contingency plan - a joint Russo-American space craft called the "Messiah" charged with a mission to divert this monstrous chunk of rock from it's path of destruction. Robert Duvall manages to conjure up some sort of gravitas as the navigator of the ship but otherwise a good cast - on paper - including Maximillian Schell, Jon Favreau, a very young Dougray Scott and Vanessa Redgrave as her mother, all really fail to make any, well, impact! The effects are quite good but I'll bet they prayed they only had to shoot the finals scenes once!

A high school Astronomy club discovers a celestial anomaly, their advisor checks it, becomes alarmed at what he finds, and things shift gears. Not bad for a movie that made "E.L.E/Extinction Level Event" a popular phrase and made the naive public aware of The Danger From Space. From there, seemingly unrelated events come to the attention of a novice TV reporter, culminating in an Apollo-Soyuz level cooperative near space mission. The star-studded crew isn't worked very hard, even as the people are divided into two groups by lottery. Nevertheless, Family is front and center, in many forms, from divided to nuclear to "baby makes three." At least the audience wasn't subjected to a barrage of macho chatter that characterized "Armageddon," but a out-of-this-world reading of "Moby Dick." Morgan Freeman's "President Tom Beck" does his best "Abraham Lincoln" in this film, which is one reason I watch this film when it is broadcast, even though I have the DVD. 8/10;)

I was really disappointed, considering all of the great actors involved and since I love science fiction and the great disaster films of days gone by. I bought the DVD used and got my money's worth--it's a decent watch. I would recommend watching if you like disaster movies or any of the actors involved, maybe even renting or buying the DVD used or for a really good price new, say for 5 bucks, but anything more would be wasteful or being ripped off.