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The first inkling of this threat flickers silently into being, masked by the adolescent sparring of young astronomers. Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) spots the blur first, without quite appreciating its import; Sarah Hotchner (Leelee Sobieski), his smile's target, reckons that the fuzz is a star. It takes a professional observer, Marcus Wolf (Charles Martin Smith), to interpret the scary message implicit. Unfortunately in his haste to alert the world, Marcus comes to more immediate harm on a dark, winding highway. A year later the people slumber unperturbed, or so it seems. It requires all of Jenny Lerner's (Téa Leoni) reporting nous to worm the truth from President Beck (Morgan Freeman).
While the majority of blockbusters seek to emulate a roller coaster, hitting ever more stomach-churning heights of thrill, Deep Impact is a beast of a different colour. Recognising that its show-stopping collision is both of slight duration and guaranteed to diminish all that follows, Mimi Leder makes a wise directorial decision; the loudest bang is saved until last. The inevitable result is that much of the movie is build-up, a dramatic ebb and flow punctuated by flashes of excitement. Such delayed gratification gives us plenty of scope to explore dramatic avenues. Backlit by the apocalypse we have Jenny's struggle with career and family, Leo's struggle with love and fame, and astronaut Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner's (Robert Duvall) struggle with age and fate. Perhaps there's a trend emerging here!
The drawback is that in its desire to hold your attention, Deep Impact tries to cover too many bases. In essence, the script of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin becomes stretched like a thin rubber sheet, gaping holes appearing spontaneously at the nexus of greatest stress. The story lumbers along, continually cutting between characters and situations, the outcome being scant opportunity for development. Even an actor of Vanessa Redgrave's calibre get short shrift, ensuring that any emotional punches come from the artificial aids; you've never witnessed so many babies at mortal risk. Freeman emerges as the most convincing performer yet even his gravitas has limits, as Deep Impact ably demonstrates.
In the end there are simply too many lulls hobbling the special effects, a consequence of cramming so many life stories into one film and failing to do justice to any of them. The most gripping moments, scattered as they are, fly in on a stiff breeze of sharp visuals and deafening sound; the best example has to be the eventual impact's crushing tidal wave. Yet, in a more complete sense, the televised lottery report embodies a surprising potency. When only one million people can be saved, a tiny segment of the population, it's easy to imagine a bilious blend of panic, hope and desperation washing across the land. Never before has the gap between the haves and have-nots yawned so wide, a bottomless chasm separating life from death. It's a frightening prospect.
Sadly, Deep Impact makes you wait a long time for the satisfaction of destruction. Even then it has the cheek to focus exclusively on the USA, to the extent that the cometry crash sites are evenly placed across the country. What happened to the rest of the planet? Maybe Leder decided that they had enough equality on the spaceship "Messiah", where the crew is full of token parties. It's a shame that, as with the rest of the cast, we're never allowed to share their lives or to invest in their future; there's an entire film here for an enterprising director. Sadly Leder is not that individual, despite her large-scale competence in the face of a dreadful screenplay. Special effects and notable cameo roles don't make Deep Impact a film worth paying for.
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