“Deep Impact” – But Impacting What?

In the next of my posts about movies which I studied for my article “Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?“, I am writing about Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998), one of two movies (Armageddon being the other), that came out in 1998 and deals with the subject of Earth being hit by a comet, as the summary on IMDb points out.

Journalist Jenny Lerner is assigned to look into the background of Secretary Alan Rittenhouse who abruptly resigned from government citing his wife’s ill health. She learns from his secretary that Rittenhouse was having an affair with someone named Ellie but when she confronts him, his strange reaction leads her to reconsider her story. In fact, a comet, discovered the previous year by high school student Leo Biederman and astronomer Dr. Marcus Wolf, is on a collision course with the Earth, an Extinction Level Event. A joint US-Russian team is sent to destroy the comet but should it fail, special measures are to be put in place to secure the future of mankind. As the space mission progresses, many individuals deal with their fears and ponder their future

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/

As I discuss in my article, there’s no ‘disaster’ genre on IMDb, so one of the things that I studied is what genre disaster movies do tend to fall into and what are the defining features of the films are there if we were to define a ‘disaster’ genre. These are the 17 conventions that the article developed. For my study, I had to consider what types of narratives to include or not include. I didn’t include animation or comedies, for example. A harder issue was ‘science fiction’. In the end I had to think carefully about what is meant by the term, as you can see from the discussion in the article. It is relevant to note this here as Deep Impact is not considered a ‘science fiction’ film on IMDb, whereas Armageddon is, despite a significant overlap in storyline.

In terms of the title of the movie, one question that I am left with is what is the ‘deep impact’? Is it the comet and the collision it makes with Earth (creating a massive tsunami)? Is it the impact it has on human society? Is it the impact on a particular journalist, the way she works and what the role of the media is? I like to think it is the last of these.

In terms of the revised list of conventions that I developed as part of my article “Disaster Narratives by Design: Is Japan Different?“, the movie has 14 out of the 17. One convention it didn’t have – which adds to the strength of the movie in my view – is that it doesn’t have a dominance of male characters. The journalist, who is largely the main protagonist, is female. Although there is no shortage of male characters, it would be unfair to label the film as being dominated by male characters. It’s a shame that this couldn’t be said about many more (disaster) movies.