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I saw Deep Impact twice this weekend, and I think it is terrific!
Unfortunately the two reviews I read were not very favorable, and both took
the position that the movie was too thoughtful and didn't have enough
action and special effects. I suppose those critics will prefer Armageddon,
which makes no sense but spent twice as much ($130M versus $60M) on the
production. This week I was filmed by ABC for a show they will show in July
dealing with the reality (?) behind Armageddon, and they commented that the
special effects were much better in Armageddon. I can believe it. The
special effects in Deep Impact are pretty good in terms of realism, but
probably below state-of-the-art in a purely technical sense. For example.
some of the computer-generated images have slightly lower resolution that
the photographic images. And I felt the water often didn't look right; the
big breaking waves are terrific, but the water sloshing about over the
landscape doesn't look much better that the "crossing the red sea" scene
from The Ten Commandments in the pre-computer age.
NASA supported Armageddon, which asked to film at Kennedy Space Center, but
the Agency had little to do with Deep Impact. Former Johnson Space Center
Director Gerry Griffin is credited with technical advice and appears
briefly in the film, however. Deep Impact uses stock footage of a Shuttle
launch, and the mission control room set looks just right -- small and
high-tech, consistent with current Agency efforts to shrink operations
staff and depend more on modern information technology in running flight
missions.
One can always nitpick the science, but in my opinion there is not one
serious error in this film -- nothing that damages its basic credibility.
There is a great deal left unsaid, and this is in fact an understated film,
so the audience is free to fill in the details in part according to how
much you know. For example, it seems as if the astronauts get instantly to
the comet, but it is entirely consistent with the film to imagine that
several months have passed -- they simply don't say how long this flight
takes. And the President uses some loose language in describing the origin
of the comet in terms of billiard-balls in the Oort cloud, but in fact we
can all easily imagine a public official not quite getting it right
technically. At least no scientists or NASA officials in this film say
anything incorrect. (Actually they don't say much at all). Probably the
most questionable science comes at the beginning and the end. At the
beginning the comet is discovered with a small amateur telescope at a star
party, but then apparently not seen again for several months. This could be
explained in terms of the comet moving into the daylight sky, except for
the little matter of it appearing at discovery in Ursa Major, a north
circumpolar constellation. And at the end the 8-km diameter comet is blown
to smithereens by a nuclear charge of a few megatons that seems way too
small to do the job. The one other problem takes place on the surface of
the comet itself, which comes to life with strong outgasing entirely too
quickly after local sunrise. The idea is fine but the realization greatly
exaggerated. Other aspects of the comet are good, especially the use of
anchors to hold the spacecraft down in the ultra-low gravity of the
surface. And the overall framework of the film is entirely plausible, from
the perspective of planetary science as well as the impact hazard.
Certainly this is much better science that any of the previous impact films
-- there is no idiocy of a comet knocking an asteroid into an impact
trajectory, or of small fragments getting through the atmosphere and
hitting individual buildings, or of impacts targeted precisely at cities
such as New York, Phoenix, or Dallas. The Deep Impact film-makers took the
trouble to find out what the real impact danger is -- both from a tsunami
due to a mile-wide impact into the ocean, and an Extinction Level Event
from a 10-km land impact. And the two-year lead time for a comet discovery
is also just about right. Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker are listed as
technical advisors in the credits, and they should be proud!
I found that Deep Impact is very impressive, thoughtful, even moving. It
focuses in the entire middle section of the film on the reaction of people
to impending doom. The approach is often subtle, based on a closeup of
fingers nervously tapping, or an exchanged glance, or an involuntary head
movement. Morgan Freeman gives a sensitive portrayal of the President, Tea
Leoni draws our sympathy as a young reporter in way over her head, and
Robert Duval turns in one of his finest performances as the old astronaut
-- a hero without the histrionics. One reviewer refers to Duval's
projection of "simple goodness -- an unclouded spirit". Unfortunately, it
is the subtlety of the film that was criticized in the reviews I read. I am
reminded of last year's Contact, which was also criticized as too cerebral
by many reviewers, who perhaps wanted to see aliens from Central Casting.
One critic of Deep Imp[act wrote that "director Mimi Leder focuses on the
anguish, fear and overwhelming grief that's provoked by an approaching
cataclysm. She couldn't have picked a harder trajectory for a season when
people mainly want to see things that go boom . . . maybe people go to
cataclysm movies for the cataclysm . . . the tidal wave seems welcome when
it arrives." Another review concluded as follows: "When the tidal wave
comes, its not a moment too soon. Still, when the comet enters the
atmosphere -- a yellow fireball across the sky -- its hard not to feel just
a bit excited that its coming. That they're all coming. Armageddon,
Godzilla, all of them".
See this film. It may do more to alert the thinking public to the impact
hazard than anything else in the past. And its images may even keep you up
at night wondering if we are doing enough to protect our planet against
this threat.
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