Deep Impact (1998)

I have a great fondness for Deep Impact: a blockbuster disaster movie that somehow manages to be moving, human, and (with some exceptions for the sake of narrative) realistic.

The story has three main threads: Jenny (Téa Leoni), a news reporter who uncovers what she thinks is a sex scandal about a young woman named Ellie; Leo (Elijah Wood), a teen astronomer who discovers the fatal comet on track to cause an Extinction Level Event, or ELE; and Fish (Robert Duvall), leader of the astronaut team sent to land on it and detonate nuclear charges.

What I find particularly charming about it is that, though the film has its quota of action, it is not an action movie in the same way as other examples of its genre, like the execrable 2012. It isn't about people running from fiery chasms: for most of the film, the characters believe President Morgan Freeman's assurances that the comet will be diverted. They struggle with hope and fear, but life goes on. When the situation worsens, well, perhaps it is too gentle in showing what happens when they give in to despair: there are no signs of rape and murder or the collapse of civilization. Or perhaps not.

It's a movie about men and women struggling to come to grips with the end of the world -- some who give up, some who fight, some who simply run, even though there is nowhere to go. As every funeral is, in its way, encouragement to live a fuller life (Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?...), so too is their impending doom life-affirming; what I most love about it is the scene of Jenny and her estranged father (Maximilian Schell) on the beach where she played as a child.

Like Lars von Trier's Melancholia, which addresses similar themes, Deep Impact is one of my favourite films of all time.

Aah, Don't Look Up might have poisoned this for me, but it's still a comforting blanket of a movie. Science! Leadership! Media dedicated to uncovering the truth!