🎶  “Have you heard . . . about the stars? . . . Ju-pi-ter could collide with Mars . . .”  🎶  A comet is on a collision course with Earth, a saga experienced through a TV Network, the teenager who first discovered the astral threat, and the team of astronauts dispatched on a deep space mission to destroy it. The ‘humanist’ epic is really about man’s ability to adapt to new problems, even when the worst can’t be avoided. Steven Spielberg producers Zanuck & Brown and director Mimi Leder, plus a fine cast: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, Maximilian Schell, Mary McCormack, Kurtwood Smith, James Cromwell, Jon Favreau and Leelee Sobieski. And it’s a knockout in a killer 4K encoding.

Deep Impact 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Paramount Home Video
1998 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 121 min. / 25th Anniversary / Street Date May 2, 2023 / Available from Amazon
Starring: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, Maximilian Schell, Mary McCormack, Kurtwood Smith, James Cromwell, Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau, Laura Innes, Richard Schiff, Leelee Sobieski, Blair Underwood, Dougray Scott, Gary Werntz, Bruce Weitz, Betsy Brantley, O’Neal Compton, Rya Kihlstedt, Alexander Baluev, Derek de Lint, Suzy Nakamura, Charles Martin Smith.
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Production Designer: Leslie Dilley
Art Directors: Dennis Bradford, Gary Kosko, Andrew Neskoromny, Tom Valentine
Costume Design: Ruth Myers
Film Editor: Paul Cichocki, David Rosenbloom
Visual Effects Supervisor: Scott Farrar
Original Music: James Horner
Written by Bruce Joel Rubin, Michael Tolkin
Produced by David Brown, Richard D. Zanuck
Directed by Mimi Leder

Oceans Rise. Cities Fall. Hope Survives. 

The new 4K release of Deep Impact gives us an opportunity to review a feature we should have covered years ago. The millennial apocalyptic ‘astral threat’ movie was upstaged at the box-office by Michael Bay’s awful Armageddon — the public appetite in 1998 chose well-marketed hee-haw escapism, over Dream Works/Paramount’s epic, sentimental update of a classic sci-fi theme.

Executive producer Steven Spielberg teamed with his  Jaws  producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck, and located an ideal director in Mimi Leder, who invests real feeling in the story’s two dozen major speaking roles. A few details feel ‘Spielberg confected’ but the overall tone comes from the material — with some luck the world might be saved. Spielberg may have discussed this one with his mentor Stanley Kubrick, while trading ideas and even casting suggestions. As with the core earlier classic  When Worlds Collide  there is an ‘Ark’ to save a bit of humanity, but in place of a spaceship is a  Kubrickian mineshaft.

 

As in Doctor Strangelove the crisis bounces between four mostly separate groups of people — a Network TV newsroom with its ambitious reporters, two middle-class family households, the President’s inner circle, and a team of  ‘Right Stuff‘-  like astronauts on a do-or-die mission. The movie looks tightly storyboarded yet director Leder sees that it’s character-driven. Ms. Leder also downplays the mannerisms we know from Spielberg’s ‘sense of wonder’ movies, the ‘Gee-Whiz staring / camera push-ins / ethereal music stings’  that became a Spielberg bugaboo. Leder trusts the narrative. Only a few moments succumb to over-hype: the swirling-camera newsroom faux-chaos with important exposition lines poking through, and maybe the ‘elite’ evacuation from Washington D.C. where 50 helicopters take off simultaneously and exit like a swarm of locusts.

Even the publicity tipped us off that this was a Spielberg production: news broke near the release of a possible asteroid collision coming, in 2028 … the same way that canny publicists planted shark attack news to hype Jaws, and flying saucer sightings to create buzz for  Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Teen astronomer Leo Biderman (Elijah Wood) and his mentor Dr. Marcus Wolf (Charlie Martin Smith) discover a rogue comet, news that is hushed up for almost a year. At CNBC News, researcher Jenny Lerner (Téa Leoni) resents being held back career-wise by the on-air reporter Beth Stanley (Laura Innes) and seizes a White House story involving cabinet member Alan Rittenhouse (James Cromwell) that might turn into a sex scandal. It instead leads Jenny directly to a secret audience with President Beck (Morgan Freeman) and the biggest story in human history: the Wolf-Biederman comet is going to collide with Earth.

 

Underway for many months and ready to launch on a comet-smashing mission is the NASA spaceship The Messiah. Its hotshot young crew is led by veteran spaceman Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall) partly because Tanner’s reputation will reassure the public that EGBOK. Captain Andrea Baker (Mary McCormack) has the same spirit as Tanner.  ↑  When The Messiah fails and is presumed lost, President Beck tells the public about options two and three — a massive missile strike to deflect the comet, and a last-ditch program to save a million Americans in underground caves. A lottery will choose 800,000 citizens. 200,000 reserved seats are kept for essential professionals, along with animals and seed specimens to reboot life after the collision dust has settled, 2 years later.

Promoted to news anchor, Jenny Lerner is the only member in her newsroom to make the Essential Ark list.  She is distressed about her broken family — her mother Robin (Vanessa Redgrave) has never gotten over the defection of Jenny’s father Jason (Maximillian Schell) to a younger woman.

Leo Biderman’s fame gets his family included on the Essential list, and Leo marries his teen girlfriend Sarah Hotchner (Leelee Sobieski of  Eyes Wide Shut),  saving her as well. Can a million people really live in a hole in the ground for two years?

 

The talents that brainstormed over Deep Impact clearly aimed to alleviate Sci-fi clichés that caused eyes to roll back in earlier stories with the same theme.  The spaceship Messiah looks to be assembled from existing parts. Its mission is exciting and unusual — a comet is not a stable place to land, with its surface of explosive gas vents. The lowering of nukes deep into fissures works a twist on a great scene in the old Sci-fi thriller  Crack in the World:  instead of falling into lava, a spaceman is ejected into space by a blast of escaping gas. The improved effects depict a massive crowd that gathers at Times Square to receive official word of the mission — a communal reaction as in the classic  The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

News blurbs suggest that President Beck’s Martial Law edict seems to work, even as we wonder how society could hold together under this pressure. What keeps public servants like cops and nurses on the job, taking abuse?  How come those taxi drivers don’t demand $1,000 a ride?  Perhaps we accept the relative calm because ‘world goes wild’ anarchy in post-apocalyptic movies is a tired cliché as well. We are told that ‘Latin American cities’ have been abandoned to looting gangs, but golly gee, that would never happen here. President Beck mentions troublemakers being dealt with harshly, but there are no scenes of summary executions, as in grim post-apocalyptic thrillers by Peter Watkins and Cornel Wilde.

 

Deep Impact earns an A+ for President Beck’s reasonable plan to choose the lucky million to enter the Ark survival cave. We do wonder about the fairness of Leo Biderman’s arranged marriage — couldn’t all of the unmarried ‘special’ invitees get hitched, and swell the ‘saved’ population by hundreds of thousands?  If Jenny Lerner and her boss Beth found the right state, maybe they could marry too and save Beth’s baby.

The ‘nobody over 50’ lottery rule . . . sounds pretty fair, dammit.  You can’t let just anybody into the survival caves. I’m so grateful that obnoxious online review gadflies are a shoo-in.

The Deep Impact screenplay should be lauded for not wallowing in morbidity. Some reviewers complained that one main character’s suicide was unnecessary. But that incident is a good way of addressing the obvious waves of suicides that would follow such a doomsday announcement. The classic  On the Beach (1959) depressed movie goers with its long lines of citizens picking up suicide pills, a major turn-off. The audiences of 1998 were even less interested in feel-bad misery.

The same goes for the film’s avoidance of orgies and sex chaos as oblivion approaches. We instead concern ourselves with Leo and Sarah’s expedient teen marriage. It doesn’t appear to come with a honeymoon, even though Leo’s high school pal insisted that “You’re gonna have a lot more sex — famous people always get more sex.”  The adept montage for the wedding sequence has a telling effect: when they take their vows, Sarah is looking not at Leo, but her father. It’s a squeaky-clean variation on Blue Denim.  A rescued baby makes three: Sexless Teen Sex and an Instant Family!  Conservatives will love it.

 

If teen astronomer Leo Biderman is a Steven Spielberg identification substitute, note that he’s a take-charge guy who does good by saving his Mom and Dad while going his own way — pretty much what the Spielberg character Sammy does in The Fabelmans.  ‘Leo – Schindler’ also saves the bloodlines of two families, via a way-cool escape on a flying E.T. bicycle mountain motorbike.

Religious reactions were a stumbling block in older Astral Collision epics — When Worlds Collide begins with the opening of a Bible. Deep Impact invokes a higher power with taste and discretion. When President Beck must deliver serious bad news, he references his personal faith:

“I believe that God hears all prayers even if sometimes the answer is No.”

Morgan Freeman is one of the more charismatic Presidents in film history, with an integrity index to match the earlier actor-contender Henry Fonda. President ‘Beck’ has the wisdom of the ages — like Charlton Heston as Moses, only wiser.  In 1998 it was assumed that the nation wasn’t ready for a black President, but the show makes no issue of it.

 

We like the casting in this show. Top-billed Robert Duvall is a righteous Team Player, an inspirational guy undaunted by the mild bravado of the ‘highly-trained children’ with whom he flies. He knows how to make hard decisions and when to throw out the rule book.

This is where most of us met Téa Leoni, whose Jenny Lerner is that nice exception, a deserving climber who learns her lessons and earns her stripes. Jenny’s on-air talent is only middling, but she projects honesty and reassurance. She’s bitter and unforgiving with her dad, a problem that sets up a MAJOR selfless act in the last scenes. Leelee Sobieski sketches teen spirit well, and her Sarah also projects a solid familial connection.  She and Leo are nominated as a new kind of Adam and Eve, suggesting earlier post-apocalyptic thrillers.

The ensemble includes the unfamiliar O’Neal Compton as a canny Presidential advisor, and Bruce Weitz (Hill Street Blues) as CNBC’s newsroom director. The head of NASA’s Mission Control is Kurtwood Smith, a treat for fans of RoboCop.  Another semi-stellar cameo is provided by James Cromwell. Did anybody in 1998 think that the mystery phrase ‘E.L.E.’ might be code for ‘Rollo Tomasi?‘

Director Leder fits all into her ensemble. Even the former big name Maximillian Schell is nicely subdued, with no showboating.

 

The big effects at the end look great considering the evolution of CGI at the time. The shot list was ambitious — showing a limitless horizon of water splashing over foothills was not going to fully convince no matter how it was done. It would seem that a celestial object crossing half the galaxy in a couple of years would strike Earth more like a bullet than a stone skipping on the stratosphere. But the sequence has some awesome visuals, so we’ll give it a pass.

The editing stretches things out so that a tidal wave traveling at hundreds of miles an hour moves in slow motion, leaving time for people to attempt to flee, or at least get up from their park benches. The shot of the twin towers of the World Trade Center not toppling is now a haunting sight, and the underwater shot with the decapitated Liberty looks forward to Spielberg’s Kubrick project Artificial Intelligence: A.I..

The visuals are impressive but  Deep Impact is really about people. Sturgeon Tanner’s proposal for a last-chance noble anti-comet counterstrike is a challenge no astronaut can ignore.  Isn’t it nice that Mission Control didn’t turn off the lights and lock the doors?  Back on Earth, the separation of the teen lovers is such a strong move, that we don’t mind the relatively trivial dash to safety on a motorbike, the story’s weakest link.

 

The combination of jeopardy and throat-clutching sentiment works for this viewer. The monster traffic jam feels credible, and the last-minute desperation in the news room grabs us as well. Jenny Lerner pulls off an effective  Sidney Carton Moment, the kind of heroic stunt that nobody even tries for these days. The writers and Mimi Leder don’t milk the pathos, which is all for the better.

Deep Impact bends science-fiction spectacle in a humanist direction. Post-pandemic audiences might appreciate that better than did millennial moviegoers when the show was new. The ‘rebuild’ finale is worrisome — we can’t imagine how bad the death and devastation must have been. We are emotionally moved the way we wanted to be moved in earlier ‘Imagination of Disaster’ movies. Positive values aren’t the norm in serious Sci-fi thrillers, so we’ll take what we can get.

Adam McKay’s recent Netflix feature Don’t Look Up could be the flip side of Deep Impact. Starting with nearly the exact same crisis scenario, rational responses are stifled by petty cynicism and selfishness, exactly the politics crippling us now. The satire of dysfunctional society is horribly accurate to the crazy days of 2021. But the public didn’t embrace the Sickening But Honest Don’t Look Up any more than they did the Reassuringly Uplifting Deep Impact. Frankly, we still love the happy finale of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!  Will Covid really go away?  Can we come out of our caves along with the little animals, and dance in the sunlight again?

 

---

 

Paramount Home Video’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital of Deep Impact 4K shows off the film’s handsome surface in greater detail and more accurate color — all those Washington locations, the decent CGI, the expressive faces. James Horner’s music provides appropriate accompaniment for the scenes of suspense and dread. The sight of Téa Leoni stuck in a midnight rainstorm is as impressive as people attacking a comet with atom bombs.

This set’s two discs present the feature in both 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray. All the extras are on the Blu-ray. The film comes with a nice set of soundtrack and subtitle language choices. The digital code will allow collectors to keep the show handy on The Cloud.

The extras are repeats from the 2009 Blu-ray — in fact, the Blu-ray included appears to be the exact same pressing as the 2009 disc. The commentary by Mimi Leder and her effects supervisor Scott Farrar is good, and so is the impressive featurette about staging the massive highway jam …. a big scene indeed.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

---

Deep Impact 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent in Spanish, French, German, Japanese (4K only)
Supplements:
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: Spanish, French, German and Japanese (4K only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and one Blu-ray with digital code in Keep case
Reviewed: April 27, 2023
(6926deep)

Visit CineSavant’s Main Column Page
Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: cinesavant@gmail.com

Text © Copyright 2023 Glenn Erickson