In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we’re looking at Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, 1998’s other killer asteroid movie.
We’ve talked before about the late-90s asteroid craze. An America that had just won two World Wars and the Cold War suddenly found itself the planet’s apex predator with no known aggressors at which to aim its sizable artillery, so we turned our attention to the stars. Last summer we covered Michael Bay’s Armageddon, which would become the top-grossing movie of 1998. But released two months earlier, Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact has made a lasting impression all its own.
Or at least, I assume it has? If it’s remembered at all today, it’s because Deep Impact was a victim of the studio wars of the time that gave us a run of dueling productions for no reason other than studio executives’ pigheaded hubris. A Bug’s Life vs Antz. Volcano vs Dante’s Peak. Deep Impact vs Armageddon. (That two of these matchups pit Disney against Dreamworks also can’t be ignored. Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg hated each other that much.)
As the story goes, screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin had been talking about the project over a lunch one afternoon, while a Disney executive listened in, took copious notes, and decided to try and beat them to the punch. Deep Impact had been in some stage of development since at least the late 1970s, when disaster epics were all the rage. It was originally to be a straight remake of the 1951 film When Worlds Collide, about Earth being wiped out by a rogue star. It sat dormant until 1995, when producer Richard Zanuck brought the project to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Unbeknownst to Zanuck, Spielberg had already optioned the rights to the Arthur C. Clarke novel The Hammer of God, itself a story about humanity trying to divert an oncoming asteroid. The two productions were combined, and then heavily rewritten into Deep Impact. This apparent incensed Clarke, who’d expected to receive some sort of author’s credit on the project.
Point being, Deep Impact was bound to come to fruition one way or the other. And while Disney and Michael Bay were hard at work racing to finish their film first, Spielberg and his team at Dreamworks soldiered on with Deep Impact anyway. Spielberg was knee-deep into production on Amistad at the time, and so elected to hand the reins over to director Mimi Leder, who had just finished work on The Peacemaker for Dreamworks. It’s been theorized that Spielberg shadow-directed this like he may or may not have done with Tobe Hooper and Poltergeist, but personally I think that’s taking agency away from Leder, whose own directing style is all over this thing.
When all was said and done, Deep Impact hit theaters two months ahead of Armageddon. And while the plots are nominally the same, the devil is in the details. Where Michael Bay turned Armageddon into a special effects rodeo of the highest order, Leder’s film focuses more on the human characters and how individual people choose to process the potential end of humanity. Y’know, humanity? The people whose lives hang in the balance? What’s going on with them? How do they feel about the comet threatening to come down on their heads? They’re probably pretty pissed about it.
The film opens as amateur astronomer Leo Beiderman (Elijah Wood) spots an unknown object in the night sky. His science teacher (Nickelodeon’s Guts host Mike O’Malley) sends the data over to a real astronomer, who immediately realizes it’s a heretofore unidentified comet “the size of Mt. Everest”, which I assume is a common unit of measurement among astronomers. On his way to deliver the news to NASA, the astronomer is run off the road and killed by distracted trucker W. Earl Brown, and everyone just forgets about the whole thing for an entire year.
Fast forward a year later and we’re now following journalist Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni), who’s investigating a potential scandal in the White House as Secretary of Treasury Rittenhouse (James Cromwell) resigns his post due to what she assumes is an affair with some woman named “Ellie”. He informs her he resigned to spend more time with his family and that maybe she should get her facts straight. She’s then arrested by the FBI and brought before the President (Morgan Freeman) who tells her it’s not ‘Ellie’ she should be concerned about, but rather ‘ELE’, which she later learns stands for ‘Extinction Level Event’. She’s not too stressed about this, though, because she’s already stressed about her dad (Maximilian Schell) divorcing her mom (Vanessa Redgrave) and marrying a younger woman instead. The world’s about to end, but people still have plenty of normal problems, I guess. Like how in Armageddon, Chick’s sole motivating force is to save face with his estranged wife and son. It gives the characters an internal life away from the plot of the movie. I appreciate that.
So yeah, the US government has known about the comet for some time, and has quietly been making preparations, including working with Russia to build a spaceship in low-earth orbit1. The plan is to destroy the comet by landing on it, drilling into it and blowing it up with a nuke. (Yeah, that sure sounds familiar…) They’ve also been busy constructing a giant underground bunker that can house exactly 1 million of the nation’s 300 million citizens. They hold a random lottery of genetically perfect specimens under the age of 50, meaning two-thirds of the country are automatically ineligible, but you better believe Frodo Baggins gets a fuckin’ ticket. Leo gets to take his whole family into the bunker because he’s America’s Special Boy (he got on the cover of Newsweek for discovering the comet and not being dead about it). He also finagles it to where he can take his girlfriend Sarah (Leelee Sobieski) and her family, but they have to get married first. But even after they’re married, the army tells her parents they have to stay behind, so she stays behind as well. She could’ve taken her baby sister with her, but I guess some things are more important than the survival of the species.
The third thread follows the crew of the spaceship Messiah as they jet off to meet the comet head-on. They only have seven hours to drill into it and plant the nuke, as medical officer Gus (Jon Favreau) repeatedly explains to whoever will listen that the comet does one full rotation every fourteen hours. This means they only have seven hours of darkness to do their job if they don’t want to get boiled alive in their spacesuits. The crew gets out of there just in time, but not before Gus gets shot out into space by a gas geyser. Also the nuke only splits the comet in two. Great, now there’s two comets. Thanks a lot, guys. But not to fear, as Captain Fish Tanner (Robert Duvall) has a plan: Take his sweet time following the comet home so at the zero hour they can crash the ship into the big part of the comet and blow it into a million pieces, saving most of the day. RIP New York, Washington DC, and half the Eastern Seaboard, but at least the flyover states are okay.
I’ll give Deep Impact this: it wastes absolutely no time getting its crew into space. Referring back to Armageddon again, you’ll recall that that film spends most of its first two hours on training exercises and comedy bits involving Bruce Willis wanting to kill Ben Affleck. By the time our guys actually get to the comet, we’ve well and truly given up caring about anything that’s happening. At a certain point, I’m actively rooting for the asteroid to wipe out humanity if this is the best and brightest we have to offer.
I don’t feel that way about Deep Impact. At times it gets bogged down in the petty lives of its characters, but for the most part it treats the human drama with respect and a modicum of intelligence. In the background we see people making whatever preparations they think are most important. Secretary Rittenhouse has quietly stocked his yacht with vitamin waters and other rations, like he thinks that’s gonna be enough to save him. Sarah’s dad secures his tools and locks up his motorcycle, either in the hope that someday he’ll return home, or at the very least that people won’t loot it in time of crisis. (This is exactly what happens.) In the basement of the White House, we see crates of Ensure nutritional shakes. I dunno if that’s meant for the bunker or if that’s just President Morgan Freeman’s morning routine. But it’s a nice, humanizing touch regardless.
You really feel the sense of desperation as plans begin to fail one by one. The Messiah fails in its first mission, and we then see the people of earth losing a little bit more hope. The last-ditch effort to launch all of earth’s Titan rockets at the comet fails2, and the president finally announces that everything is doomed. Slowly but surely, our characters realize this is really happening. I kept finding myself thinking about Adam McKay’s COVID parable Don’t Look Up, in which an entire political party convinces half the country that an asteroid isn’t actually on a collision course with Earth. It’s not a great movie by any means, but the finale where people finally resign themselves to their fate sends a chill down my spine. If it ever actually happened, I feel like I’d be the one sitting around the dinner table just wishing smarter minds could have saved us.
Deep Impact, though, isn’t so bleak. We get a spectacular scene of a tsunami absolutely obliterating New York City, after the smaller chunk of the asteroid crashes into the Atlantic. But once the Messiah succeeds in their mission, the larger piece of asteroid rains down in a hail of meteors upon the planet, no doubt causing hundreds of untold random casualties, but at least the planet at large is saved. Deep Impact, ultimately, is a film that believes in humanity’s better angels, as any good disaster epic should. It doesn’t fall into a lot of the jingoistic traps that plague Armageddon, but it’s also a more somber, moody story that doesn’t indulge in any delusions of grandeur. It takes the threat of a comet slamming into the planet seriously, and treats the existential crisis that that situation conjures as one worth examining. If you forced me to choose which film I prefer… Ehh… That’s tough. I think I respect Deep Impact more, but I can’t say it’s more fun than Armageddon. As it turns out, there’s room for both in the pantheon of cosmic calamity cinema. Who knew?
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
While far from Favreau’s biggest role to date, this is absolutely the biggest production he’s been a part of3. Here, he plays Dr. Gus Partenza, the Messiah‘s slightly neurotic medical officer. It’s obvious Favreau wasn’t given much to work with, so what little expository dialogue he gets becomes his only character trait. As mentioned above, before the crew launches into space, Gus seems obsessed with the fourteen-hour rotational period of the comet, repeating the fact to anyone who’ll listen. Favreau apparently knew he had to make an impression quickly, because he’s the first one to die once they land on the comet. He doesn’t get much to do, but the movie sure lets you know he was there.
FINAL RATING
3.5 stars (out of 5). S’pretty good.
NEXT TIME: A major thin-ice situation.
- How they managed to keep this a secret is a mystery to me.
↩︎ - How this plan fails is never actually explained, as you’d think a hundred nuclear warheads would at least divert the comet’s path, right? But all we get is a simple “Well that didn’t work…”
↩︎ - Excepting Batman Forever, which he’s barely even in.
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