Deep Impact

This was supposed to be the human-interest asteroid apocalypse movie, as opposed to the testosterone-fired exuberance of "Armageddon." The problem with this movie is that the main human we are supposed to be interested in is Tea Leoni. Now, I have never seen Tea Leoni in anything other than this movie, but she does the single worst job of acting from a purportedly main character that I have seen in many a month. The basic problems are:

(a) her voice almost exactly like the woman on the phone who tells you that you forgot to dial the area code in front of the phone number, only more whiny; and

(b) the only way they can make her face expressive is a lighting trick at one point in the movie. For the rest of the movie, she is wooden as a Mercedes dashboard.

These two problems make it hard for the average viewer to be convinced that she is, in fact, human, and thus they inhibit interest in her as such a being. (Incidentally, when David Duchovny had his pick of all the X-philes in the world, some of whom I am sure are very attractive, the motives behind his choice of Leoni are mysterious to me. Perhaps she's just acting like she has no emotions in this movie, which is a scary thought.) Well, you say, Lindemann, you put up with much worse acting jobs than that routinely. This is true. But all those acting jobs are by people who bring something more than acting to the party, such as extreme attractiveness or the ability to kill vast numbers of people with their bare hands. Furthermore, it is a bit beyond even my limits of plausibility that such a robotic machine woman is cast as a TV anchorwoman (it's on MSNBC, which owes someone a whole lot of money for all the mentions that useless network gets in this movie). She functions as the Exposition Lady, and believe me, it is painful to have her up on screen, with that voice rendered in depressingly accurate SDDS stereo in beautiful AMC City Place.

I am also not sure I agree with the whole premise of the human-interest apocalypse movie. Tea Leoni's agonizingly slowly explained problem with her father might be interesting were it not for the fact that the audience, at least, is aware that they are both probably going to be dead very soon if someone more important and less annoying doesn't do something very soon. In fact, the portions of this movie which deal with people doing something about the comet are pretty good. Robert Duvall is expressive and effective as the only seasoned astronaut in a ship full of young punks (some people have complained that the astronauts are badly acted. What do they want? They're supposed to be shallow punks. That's how they seem).

The action scenes are fairly well executed. (The director is Mimi Leder, who had the same problem of irrelevant human emotion in "The Peacemaker," a movie chiefly notable for its incredibly stupid-looking billboards.) We get to see New York get totally trashed in an amusing way (although not nearly as amusingly as "Godzilla" promises to trash it in two weeks). And Morgan Freeman's voice is a pleasure to listen to, anytime. He could read the headlines of these stupid medical journals and keep me listening raptly. His speeches are so much more gripping than anything Tea Leoni says by voice alone that it is a pain to come back.

That's the problem with this movie, that you keep coming back to things that are less adrenaline-inducing than the action and decision segments, so they need to be better acted. And they absolutely are not. They aren't even acceptably badly acted, in Leoni's case. There is also a subplot where this 14-year-old boy gets selected to be hidden in Missouri underground as "essential personnel," and he really wants his girlfriend along, so he proposes marriage to her so that she will be family and can come along into the pit. The only fun part of this subplot is that he gets to end this marriage proposal with the line, "Please. It's your only chance to survive."

Maybe this movie isn't so bad after all.

Believability: Tea Leoni is to TV anchorperson as Al Gore is to rave promoter.Also normally you would notice a large celestial object pointed at your home planet more than 2 years in advance.

Tension: Tension arises when Duvall is in danger and drops precipitously when anything else is happening. There are some triage scenes towards the end which in another movie might be really chilling, but by then I was just tired of everyone and wanted them to die in a horrible apocalypse.

Action: The scene on the surface of the comet is really cool. People running up hills is only cool when Hitchcock does it in "North by Northwest." There's just not enough action in this movie to carry it, and certainly not enough acting.

Attractive Man Count: None of the astronauts count, so it's all Morgan Freeman, whose voice alone should get him counted here. 1.

Attractive Woman Count: Uh, there are some people in the newsroom who aren't Tea Leoni who are attractive... I'll say a 1 as a combination grade. I would give that boy's girlfriend a 1 if she were older.

Overall Grade: D+. Maybe it is so bad after all.

p.s. You know what is really frustrating? Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, both of whom are very nice and down-to-earth people who deserve the massive amounts of money a movie deal can bring, have written four good books together. All of these books are scientifically plausible, accessible, fast-moving, and smart. In others words, superior movie-adaptation material. One of these, "Footfall," is a lot like "Independence Day," but far superior. Another, "Lucifer's Hammer," is a lot like "Deep Impact," but far superior. If I see a movie next summer about humans in the future who, having discovered space travel and built up an empire, meet an alien race that is clearly more intelligent than them but somehow handicapped by a circumstance beyond their control, just like "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand," I will become convinced that, while there may be good in the world, there is certainly none in Hollywood.

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