I'm not quite sure how Deep Impact ended up in my Netflix queue. I think because it's directed by Mimi Leder, who also did The Peacemaker which I really liked. Deep Impact is not a good movie though. It's about a comet that is about to strike the Earth, and has a very similar plot to Armageddon which surprisingly came out in the same year, 1998. I wonder what sparked these asteroid-extinction movies? Perhaps comet Shoemaker-Levy in 1994?
In any event, Armageddon, in spite of being a bit stylistically overdone, was a really good movie. Another extinction movie, The Day After Tomorrow, was also a good movie. So what went wrong with Deep Impact, which ostensibly has a more noble purpose, dealing more with the relationships reactions of the people before the impact? I think it's because there's just too many storylines going on, and not enough focus put on any one of them. Out of all the characters, perhaps we get to know the Tea Leoni one the best. But we hardly get to know the others, and so they end up rather one-dimensional. Armaggedon and The Day After Tomorrow were much more focused, and so emotionally they hit harder.
Deep Impact was kind of cool in the number of familiar actors that show up in the movie. It's like a bizarre trivia contest of semi-successful movie and TV stars, including Tea Leoni, Robert Duvall, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Ron Eldard, Leelee Sobieski, Dougray Scott, etc. Although it does have Morgan Freeman.
