| One could say Deep Impact is an above average action movie or an average drama. |
| An article in my local paper says that scientists have actually said that the majority of the science in the movie (OK, besides the shuttle mission objectives) is fairly accurate - I'm no rocket scientist, and the rocket scientist I saw it with got a little hung up on the nukes in space - but all parties agree the governmental ability to cover up an extinction level event would be nil. |
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| To begin with, any movie with Morgan Freeman as president, directed by an ER veteran (Mimi Leder) dealing with epic unavoidable disaster is OK by me. |
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Disaster movies have enjoyed a new renaissance in recent years, utilizing the awesome technologies previously nonexistent in the Airport 75-era. Since they have so much more to show than tell, they now overall forgo telling at all, ditching Poseidon Adventure character development in favor of Twister eye-popping cow juggling. |
| Deep Impact returns to the more effective model of news-reaction-various attempts-disaster-aftermath, rather than the Young Hollywood's premature ejaculation model of hi my name is WHAM-aftermath-lamer protracted aftermath. We can't care that comets decimate a bunch of people we never met. Independence Day was all about cool explosions and did you notice that 1/3 of the earth's population was destroyed? Not me - the friggin DOG survived! Woo hoo! |
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Leder scrolls us through a variety of characters and then kills a gutsy large number of them off - there will be no hugging across story lines, despite the lead's unusually intimate connection to the disaster. The best part is that people, no matter how well developed, how warned in advance they are, still act like morons and wait until the last minute to do anything. |
| I don't need to tell you that a comet hits the earth, do I? But of course most of the movie is taken up with our varying attempts at stopping it, hurling our bones and rocks at the monolith. |
| Knowing that the comet strikes takes quite a lot out of the tension of the scenes - "Well, I know this fails, I saw the dang thing hit during the previews." I actually tried to talk myself into thinking, maybe that was a computer generated "what if" that the press in the movie create to demonstrate what will happen if they fail, a la the Titanic computer generated thing, but pre-disaster. |
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| I was desperate for tension. But I was gratified by the amount of genuine feeling and caring and sympathy I had for all these people. Freeman has a delicious speech to the American people that moved me quite a bit. Ron Eldard too gets a scene, and Vanessa Redgrave too.I thought the science was a little suspect, but what do I know? |
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I am liberal arts all the way. Of course, watching HBO's From the Earth To The Moon made me feel like an expert and I thought they acted like they were on a real mission. Even if it had been bogus, it felt like they THOUGHT about it. At least our heroes don't survive a 10000 foot tidal wave holding on to the ledge of a building or anything. |
| Unfortunately, the very interesting quandary and human dilemma of thenational lottery to select survivors was steamrolled by the MSNBC promotional freak show. |
The emotional content of the film skates just at the edge of maudlin but the sincerity of performers like Freeman and Eldard and Redgrave keep us from falling in the abyss. It's an interesting mix of sentiment and spectacle and certainly worth seeing on the big screen. And if I didn't know Morgan Freeman tended to shun the spotlight, I would write him in for President.
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