DEEP IMPACT

 

THREE STARS - Thoughtful

 

 

        The impact of Mimi Leder’s film is not as deep as its name implies.  “Deep Impact” is engaging, the special effects are realistic and the premise is believable, but the human issues one would expect to be discussed if the human race is about to be annihilated are missing in all but a few notable moments. 

        If a comet truly was to collide with Earth and bring about the extinction of all life within a few months, then our concerns as human beings would be more than to try to develop ways to assure that the human species continues.  Yet this seems to be the primary concern of the people within this film.

        President Beck (Morgan Freeman), as a dignified and capable leader of our nation, has one year to try to come up with a plan to save the human race.  One of his decisions is to keep the possibility of our extinction a secret from us.

        This decision raises difficult moral questions:   Is it right for our leaders to keep the impending end of our world and the probability of our mass extinction a secret?  Does the fact that our leaders have access to information that we as citizens don’t have give them the right to deceive us?

        We recognize, as the film also portrays, that such a catastrophic event would require our government to put the nation into a state of marshal law with the freezing of all economic wages and prices in order to protect us from the dishonest, greedy and dangerous, but does this threat also give our government the right to keep such an important event a secret? 

        The film implies that it does not have that right when a television reporter, Jenny Lerner (Tea Leoni), stumbles onto the secret and threatens to expose it.  Although at first she thinks that the president is having an affair with a woman named Ellie, she soon discovers that the initials stand for E.L.E. - Extinction Level Event.  These words are used by paleontologists to describe what was assumed to be a comet which collided with the earth millennia ago and killed the dinosaurs.

        But when President Beck asks Lerner to keep the story a secret because it would be best for the country, Lerner asserts that she believes that telling the truth is what is best for the country.

        We concur.  The use of secrecy in government has been misused to such an extent that now leadership has convinced itself that it is morally right to deceive the very people whom the leader has sworn to serve. 

        But the issue within the film we found to be most lacking was the absence of spiritual discussion.  With the exception of a wonderful moment when the President leaves his prepared speech and simply speaks from the heart and asks the nation to pray for God’s help in delivering us from the catastrophe, the other characters within the film are portrayed as living life in a spiritual vacuum.

        In what could have been a wonderful opportunity to speak about the meaning of life, the importance of faith and the ultimate care and comfort of God, there is no such discussion.

        In real life, when even one person is nearing death, the conversations of the family and friends naturally turn to the spiritual questions of our existence:  Is there life after life?  Does God intervene and miraculously save the dying?  Does God use doctors and medicine to do his work, or are only supernatural miracles the true hand of God at work in a person’s life?

        In a wonderful Christ-like act of giving their lives so that others might live, the crew of a joint American and Russian spacecraft, named the Messiah, decide to perform a suicidal mission by piloting their ship and its warheads into the very heart of the comet in an attempt to save our world.

        But even in this act, there is no discussion of the kind of beliefs and motivations that would cause them to act so selflessly.

        The focus instead is on how our government has created a great underground cave in the soft sandstone of Missouri as a kind of “Noah’s Ark” in order to preserve the seeds of a new world.  Although there are the Biblical motifs of both the Ark and the spaceship being named after Jesus as the self-sacrificing Messiah, there is never any discussion about these larger issues.

        For “Deep Impact” to truly reach into our souls, the spiritual emptiness needs to be filled with deeper conversations and prayers which most assuredly would be present in the real world if this catastrophe were to really happen.  As it is, “Deep Impact” only begins to study the impact of this intriguing possibility.

 

 

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