Deep Impact Details

A huge comet is on a collision course with Earth in director Mimi Leder's science-fiction disaster movie, which gains a certain amount of credibility by highlighting the human side of the impending catastrophe. The frightening scenario focuses on TV reporter Téa Leoni, who stumbles upon the story while tracking down what she thinks is a Presidential indiscretion, and astronaut Robert Duvall, who leads a mission to intercept the threat in space. The chilling gravity of the situation is hauntingly evoked by the national lottery that's put in place to choose who will “survive” in an underground retreat. Leder adds gripping immediacy to executive producer Steven Spielberg's loose remake of Rudolph Maté's 1951 movie When Worlds Collide and caps it all with a spectacular display of epic destruction.

Something of a feel-bad disaster movie, in which the world is almost destroyed, while the audience is slowly drowned in the sticky syrup of sentimentality. What is truly striking is the poverty of imagination: the end of all life is a theme worth more tha