Deep Impact.
In 1998, everyone was getting ready for the big Year 2000. People had mixed feelings about the whole thing, with many predicting global disasters on an apocalyptic scale. Hollywood decided that the best way to address these fears was to monetise them, and created two movies—Deep Impact and Armageddon—that shared the same basic plot:
* giant asteroid is heading to Earth
* it's going to hit and wipe out pretty much all life on the planet
* we might be able to stop it just in time
* this will involve sending astronauts up in space to land on the asteroid and blow it up
Today Deep Impact is widely seen as the ginger-haired step-cousin of Armageddon, but I personally believe this is an unfair assessment. Both movies were released in summer, and both performed extremely well at the box office, although Deep Impact (with box office returns of $350 million against a budget of just $80 million) was easily the more profitable of the two.
Deep Impact begins strongly, with an innocent scientist burning to death after just three scenes have elapsed. It's a great start.
Twelve months flash by, and we're introduced to Téa Leoni, who was smoking hot at the time this movie was made, with no suggestion of the sad decline that would later follow.
We also meet Elijah Wood, playing some awkward little scrote that nobody cares about.
Morgan Freeman naturally gets a part, because if the world is going to end we need a decent voiceover.
Most of all, ladies and gentlemen, we are graced with the presence of a dangerously jailbaity 15 year old Leelee Sobieski, who looks as though she just might be legal, but absolutely is not.
The plot unfolds pretty much as you'd expect, but unlike other movies of its type, Deep Impact commendable resists the temptation of a predictable 'everything's-going-to-be-OK-now' conclusion. Earth still gets hit, squillions of people die—including Téa Leoni!—and the Twin Towers are destroyed by some reasonably convincing CGI.
It's not without its weaknesses, but when compared with other summer disaster films, Deep Impact can hold its head up pretty high. And it gave us Leelee Sobieski, for which I am eternally grateful.
I rate Deep Impact at 23.31 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as a perky 7/10 on IMDB.