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Deep Impact and Armageddon

Here are movie reviews of Deep Impact and Armageddon that will
be released this year.  Warning: the movie plots are revealed, so
read at your own risk.

Ron Baalke

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: David Morrison (david.morrison@arc.nasa.gov)

NEW FILMS: DEEP IMPACT AND ARMAGEDDON

Two major Hollywood productions dealing with the asteroid and comet impact
danger are being released in 1998: Deep Impact (a Spielberg/Dreamworld
Production) on May 8 and Armageddon (Disney Films) on July 1. These films
may do more to publicize the impact hazard than all previous media coverage
taken together.  But are the films technically credible, and what effect
will they have on public attitudes toward asteroid and comet impacts?

Deep Impact (Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures) is directed by Mimi Leder
and stars Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, and
Morgan Freeman. The Executive Producers are Steven Spielberg, Joan Bradshaw
and Walter Parkes. Listed as scientific advisors are Carolyn and Gene
Shoemaker, Chris Luchini, Joshua Colwell, Gerry Griffin, and David Walker,
and the original idea is from the novel Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke.
The story line concerns a comet a few miles in diameter that is headed for
the Earth.  Much of the plot is about what people would consider most
important if they knew that they only had a few months to live, reminiscent
of the classic science fiction film When Worlds Collide. While the planet
prepares for disaster, astronauts try to use nuclear explosives to deflect
the comet, but they succeed only in breaking it into two pieces, one of
which (2 km in diameter) strikes in the Atlantic ocean and wipes out
coastal cities by a spectacular tsunami that engulfs the entire US eastern
seaboard. The larger fragment is deflected at the last minute by a heroic
and suicidal effort, so the rest of the planet is spared.

Technically, Deep Impact is reasonably accurate. The idea of a comet being
spotted about 2 years before impact is plausible, and the strategy to
deflect it with nuclear explosives is also appropriate. The special effects
on the surface of the active comet are realistic, as is the tsunami
produced when the smaller fragment hits the Atlantic. The film makes no
mention of other environmental effects of a 2-km ocean impact, but it
correctly anticipates the extremely serious consequences of the larger
impact (what they call an ELE or extinction-level event). The idea of a
nuclear-powered spacecraft to take astronauts to the comet is fiction, of
course, at least in terms of current technology, but the film gets high
marks for understanding the nature of the impact threat and for the quality
of its special effects imagery.

Armageddon, staring Bruce Willis and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer for
Disney, is quite another story, and one suspects that it was never
concerned about technical accuracy -- perhaps more of a spoof like
Independence Day or Men in Black. No one from the comet/asteroid community
was consulted, and the only technical advice that is credited is from
former NASA employees Joe Allen and Ivan Beckey. In this case the
threatening NEO is an asteroid "the size of Texas", which is about a
million times larger (in mass and energy) than any Earth-crossing asteroid,
but the warning time is just a few weeks. Instead of entrusting planetary
defense to trained astronauts or the military, a bunch of amateurs is
recruited, given a week of training, and blasted off in two Space Shuttles
to intercept the asteroid. Apparently no one told the producers that the
Shuttle is limited to low Earth orbits. The job of the astronauts is to
drill down about 200 m and plant nuclear explosives.  Unlike the sets of
Deep Impact that try to portray the surface of a comet accurately, the
asteroid set for Armageddon does not look at all like an asteroid, and
strangely the hole they drill glows orange as if there were magma just
below the surface. The world may be saved in Armageddon, but the
credibility of the movie is a casualty.

These are the fourth and fifth movies respectively made about the impact
hazard, so further comparisons are in order. First came the 1979 Hollywood
film Meteor, staring Sean Connery and Natalie Wood, in which a joint
US/USSR effort is made to intercept the incoming asteroid and disrupt it
with nuclear explosives. The major tragedy is thus averted, although
several smaller hits demonstrate the destructive power of impacts
(especially one that strikes in Central Park, New York City). The initial
premise of the film, with an asteroid knocked out of the main belt and into
the Earth's path, is ridiculous, but most of the rest of the film is
reasonably plausible, and it makes for a good cold-war era thriller. Meteor
was not well received at the time, however, in part because reviewers did
not take the impact possibility seriously. The next film was Fire from the
Sky, made for television in the late 1980s. Here a comet takes out Phoenix,
Arizona. There is no attempt to intercept the comet, and most of the drama
concerns issues of when to warn the populace and (given that the warning
was delayed till the last minute) how to evacuate Phoenix in time. Third
was the 1997 TV "miniseries" Asteroid, which ran for more than 3 hours but
was later released on videotape in a 2-hour version. As in Meteor, the film
starts implausibly with a comet diverting a main-belt asteroid into a
collision course. This time the target is Dallas, Texas, with a smaller
impact near Kansas City. The special effects are weak, the efforts to stop
the incoming asteroid with airborne radar are ludicrous, and after the
impact the film settles into a generic disaster format, with people trapped
in collapsed buildings, lost children, and the like. The only good thing
one could say about this film is that everyone works together to deal with
the disaster; there are no dumb subplots or human villains.

These five films can be ranked according to their realism and technical
accuracy in portraying the threat of a cosmic impact.  From best to worst,
they are Deep Impact, Fire from the Sky, Meteor, Asteroid, and Armageddon.
But whatever their technical strengths or weaknesses, they should sensitize
the public to the existence of an impact danger, and perhaps also to the
fact that we could mount a defense against an incoming object and thus
avert the disaster entirely. One would not expect the defenses to be
entirely successful in a movie, because that would mean no spectacular
visual impact effects, but in real life we proably would have a better
chance of success, at least if we were given several decades of warning
before the impact.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

David Morrison, Director of Space
NASA Ames Research Center, MS 200-7
Mountain View CA 94035-1000
Tel 650 604 5094; Fax 650 604 1165
david.morrison@arc.nasa.gov or dmorrison@mail.arc.nasa.gov
website: http://space.arc.nasa.gov
website: http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov
website: http://impact.arc.nasa.gov