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Deep Impact (film)
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Deep Impact is a 1998 disaster film/science fiction film released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. The film is directed by Mimi Leder. Its cast is headed by Elijah Wood, Téa Leoni, Morgan Freeman, Leelee Sobieski and Robert Duvall. The interrelated stories of the plot describe events which take place surrounding the discovery of the fictional "Comet Wolf-Biederman," due to impact Earth, and its subsequent approach to our planet.
- Taglines
- "Heaven and Earth are about to collide."
- "Cities fall. Oceans rise. Hope survives."
Contents
- 1 Cast
- 2 Plot summary
- 3 Source material alterations
- 4 Competition
- 5 Trivia
- 6 See also
- 7 External links
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Cast
Plot summary
Leo Biederman (Wood) and Sarah Hotchner (Sobieski), two teenage astronomy club members, discover a new object amongst the stars. Leo takes a photo and mails it and the coordinates to astronomer Dr. Marcus Wolf (C.M. Smith). Wolf confirms the sighting at an observatory. He discovers that the comet will hit the Earth and attempts to alert his colleagues, but is unable to get through. He saves the data to a disk, but dies in a car crash on the way down from the observatory.
One year later, Jenny Lerner (Leoni), a field reporter for
MSNBC in
Washington, DC, finds out about a government secret called "Ellie" that is connected to President Tom Beck (Freeman) and might have had something to do with the resignation of
Secretary of the Treasury Alan Rittenhouse (
James Cromwell). Initially suspecting the Treasury Secretary or even the President of having an affair with a woman named Ellie, she confronts President Beck. She learns that it is really "E.L.E", the
acronym for an
extinction-level event. Beck invites her to a press conference, where he announces the comet's existence. The object is seven miles wide, large enough to destroy civilization if it strikes the Earth. President Beck announces that NASA is going to send a crew of astronauts on the spaceship
Messiah to the comet, now named "Wolf-Biederman". Led by Captain Spurgeon Tanner (Duvall), their mission is to destroy it using
nuclear weapons.
Life changes drastically worldwide, and Leo Biederman and Jenny Lerner both become celebrities, though Leo tries to live as normal a life as he can. He and Sarah fall in love. Jenny is swiftly promoted to an anchor for MSNBC, and is reunited with her estranged father (Schell), though their relationship is still quite strained.
Messiah is constructed in orbit. The crew use the Space Shuttle Atlantis to reach it. They travel to the comet and plant the bombs, but their medical officer, Dr. Gus Partenza (Favreau), is lost, and pilot Oren Monash (Eldard) is blinded and severely burned. The nuclear explosion's shock wave damages the vessel, cutting off contact with mission control. The comet is not destroyed, however, instead splitting into two objects, one piece six miles wide ("Wolf")—the other 1.5 miles wide ("Biederman"). Messiah’s remaining crew sets a course back to Earth, still carrying some unused bombs, in the hopes of making one last attempt to destroy one or both.
President Beck, acknowledging Messiah’s failure, announces that special caves have been built in Missouri and other areas as a contingency. The government will conduct a lottery to randomly select 800,000 ordinary Americans to join 200,000 pre-selected scientists, engineers, teachers, artists, soldiers and officials. These people will be part of a worldwide effort to save humanity from extinction.
Beck declares martial law and a freeze on prices as the lottery's selectees are notified. Jenny and Leo are both among the pre-selected. Leo, being a minor, is permitted to bring his family. He also gets permission to marry Sarah, in order to save her and her family. But when it comes time to evacuate to the caves, the soldiers have no record of Sarah's family being allowed to accompany Leo and Sarah, prompting Sarah to remain behind as well.
Upon arriving at the caves, Leo leaves, determined to be with Sarah whether he lives or not. He makes his way to her home, but finds it empty. He sees a motorbike chained to a workbench in the garage. He finds the key and takes the motorbike. He locates Sarah and her family gridlocked on a freeway. With her parents' blessing, he takes Sarah and her infant brother on the motorbike to the Appalachian Mountains.
Meanwhile, MSNBC is being evacuated by helicopter. Jenny gives her seat to co-worker and rival Beth Stanley (Innes) because she has a young daughter, and sends them off to the caves. She then goes to the coast to be with her estranged father at his beach house. They have time to reconcile before they face their doom.
Ultimately, after a last-ditch effort to use all of Earth's missile-borne nuclear weapons to destroy the comets fails, "Biederman" splashes down in the North Atlantic Ocean near Virginia Beach and Cape Hatteras, creating a megatsunami over 400 meters tall ("anywhere from 1000 to 3500 feet high", as Freeman's character, President Beck, says in the film) that inundates the Atlantic coastline and reaches as far inland as the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys (600-700 miles from the coast). Jenny, her father, and Sarah's parents all die, along with countless others. Coastal cities such as Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are destroyed, as well as Atlanta and Florida (as seen from the Messiah spacecraft). Leo and Sarah manage to climb high enough to survive.
The crew members of
Messiah inform NASA of their decision to try to blow up the remaining, larger fragment by flying into a fissure that has formed in the comet and exploding the remaining bombs. They will all die whatever the result, but have enough time to say goodbye to their families. Oren Monash is told that his wife, who was expecting their first child when he departed, has given birth to their son, whom she has named after Oren. She arrives just in time to say goodbye to him.
Messiah succeeds in breaking up "Wolf" into small enough pieces that they burn up entering Earth's atmosphere, saving humanity.
Afterwards, President Beck gives an inspirational speech, in front of the reconstruction of the U.S. Capitol building, to begin recovery and rebuilding efforts.
Spoilers end here.
Source material alterations
Though producer Steven Spielberg optioned the Arthur C. Clarke novel The Hammer of God for film production, the film bears no resemblance to the novel, and Clarke was not given any credit on the film.[1] Whereas Deep Impact is depicted in a setting roughly contemporary to the release of the film, Clarke's The Hammer of God is set in the future. While the film deals with the pending impact of a comet on planet Earth, the novel is focused on the pending impact of an asteroid that is discovered by an astronomer on Mars. ([2] [3] [4]) Also, none of the individuals in the novel are present in the film.
Competition
-
A competing "space impact" film, Armageddon, was released about two months following Deep Impact. This followed suit with the "Volcano" theme of the previous year, when Dante's Peak and Volcano were released in close succession. Deep Impact's story is generally considered to be more serious than Armageddon, and has a stronger emphasis on the effect on society. Deep Impact was also lauded by astronomers as being scientifically relevant, unlike other motion pictures based on the asteroid-hits-earth scenario. Nevertheless, although both films were successful, Armageddon was more successful at the box office.
Trivia
- Deep Impact was the first Hollywood movie where an African American is seen as a sitting President of the United States.
- MSNBC, a division of NBC and a real-life news entity, was a major plot device in the film. However, Viacom, the parent of Paramount Pictures, would purchase NBC news rival CBS in 1999 (they would eventually purchase DreamWorks as well, after which CBS once again became its own company).
- An actual giant object from space did once strike the general area of the Eastern Seaboard where "Biederman" impacted in the film. Hitting the Norfolk, Virginia vicinity about 35 million years ago, it created the huge, now-buried Chesapeake Bay impact crater.
- The film portrays the wave that struck New York City crashing over and around the towers of the World Trade Center, which were the only buildings barely above water at the end of the sequence, surviving the wave. After the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks, some television broadcasts of the film were edited to remove the buildings.
- At the beginning of the movie when Dr. Wolf is using his computer the screen reads May 10, 1998.
- In the movie, the comet slowly streaked across the sky and could be watched. In reality, any comet or asteroid would go across the sky thousands of times the speed of sound, and due to the friction of the comet entering Earth's atmosphere, it would blind anyone trying to view it.
- Early in the movie, Dr. Wolf (Charles Martin Smith) is shown working at the "Adrian Peak Observatory in Arizona." That scene was actually filmed in the dome of the 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory, north of Los Angeles. This telescope was used by Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s to prove that "spiral nebulae" are actually other galaxies outside the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding.
- This film discussed preparations for surviving a massive comet strike upon the Earth, and mineshafts are drafted into service for this reason, in an echo of the survival plan in Dr. Strangelove. Additionally, a lottery system is proposed for selection of candidates for survival, much like that proposed by Dr. Strangelove himself.
- When the tsunami first travels through the ocean towards the eastern seaboard of the United States, two oil platforms are pictured. This seems somewhat out-of-place, as most oil platforms would be found in the Gulf of Mexico.
- The freeway where the traffic jam occurs, the Virginia State Route 234 bypass around Manassas[5], was a recently-constructed road, and the film directors asked the Virginia Department of Transportation if they could use a 2-mile stretch of road for the traffic jam scenes. They were given permission to use the road, after "filling out an obscenely large amount of paperwork". Also on the road, the signs say "Virginia Beaches - 6 Miles". If the signs mean Virginia Beach, Virginia, then this would be a somewhat humorous spelling mistake, but Virgina Beach is 195 miles southeast of Manassas, which itself is several miles from any type of beach area or waterfront at that. The closest major waterfront area would be the banks of the Potomac River, which is about 30 miles directly east of Manassas.
- In the Director's Commentary and Special Features, the director and computer animators admitted to putting "one hell of a mean-looking face" on the comet, as a bit of an in-joke.
- An episode of from the sixth season of The Simpsons entitled "Bart's Comet" predates this movie by three years and features an almost identical plot, with the object being destroyed as well as a failed attempt to destroy it.
- The comet is depicted as nearly white when in reality comets are among the darkest objects in the Solar System, normally reflecting about 3% of the light that hits them (in comparison, Earth reflects about 39%). The movie producers were aware of this fact, but special effects technology of the time made it extremely difficult to depict a black object against black space.
- At the beginning of the movie Leo says the unknown object (which would later turn out as the comet) is "about 10 degrees south" of some stars he recognized. If it were 10 degrees away he wouldn't have seen it. What you can overlook with a telescope while looking at one place would be only a tiny fraction of a degree.
- On the list from which Dr. Wolf takes the name of Leo Biederman his name is spelled "Beiderman", and Dr. Wolf writes it the same way when he labels the disk with the comet's data. In the credits, the name is spelled Biederman.
- A spoof was done on the Chappelle's show on what would really happen when President Beck (Freeman) tells the public that the earth will be impacted
See also
