Director's Cut
Last uploaded: Sunday, May 10, 1998

My review of "Deep Impact"

(SPOILER WARNING: If you don't want to know key plot points that take place in Deep Impact, don't read this section!)

Last Friday night I went to see Deep Impact. I brought with me a mixture of expectations: I had read the script months earlier and was overwhelmed by it, yet the audience feedback I had been receiving from test screenings said the movie was leaving them uninspired. CA sources working within the biz were reporting the same verdict to me. The day before the film opened domestically, both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter reviewed the film and gave it less than glowing praise. I kept hearing phrases like "it's borderline", "TV movie-of-the-week-ish" and "the sum is less than the number of parts" from those who had seen it.

This was my first choice of the most anticipated movies I wanted to see in 1998? What had happened to it along its path of production? How could that script, written by Michael Tolkin (director of the upcoming Twenty Billion project) and Bruce Joel Rubin (writer of Ghost and Jacob's Ladder), could possibly be filmed wrong? When Spielberg had turned this one down and hand-picked Mimi Leder to direct it, even though some of Spielberg's stuff had been hit-or-miss with me before, I thought the project was in very good hands.

So I went to see the 9:30 showing of Deep Impact Friday night, and by the time I left the movie theater I was mad -- mad at the people who felt it was necessary to change the Deep Impact script into the lobotomized version I saw on the screen, and mad that this same sort of thing had happened once again.

I'm getting up on my soapbox -- so you've been warned.

So here's the background: any film you've ever seen isn't the result of one person, it's the product of a collaborative effort. But I believe there's a small number of critical positions -- the director, producers, stars, and writers -- that can influence and shape what we'll see on the big screen. Yeah, there are other factors that can exert sizable pressure to shape the film too -- the studio or another crew or cast member with some kind of influence -- but for the most part that's uncommon. It happens but not all the time; there's usually just a half-dozen players that can radically alter a film from its origin to the finished product.

And anywhere along this stage of development in any number of ways a film can go rotten. It can stray away from its original vision, or it can be used as nothing more than a lever by an arrogant member of that team who wants more money or more credit than their fair share. Real world politics gets magnified up there on the screen.

And somewhere along the way of Deep Impact's development, something went wrong. I think it may have been a number of wrong creative decisions and maybe what I saw in that script wasn't what Mimi Leder saw in it, but I do remember putting down the original script and thinking to myself: wow. If this is handled exactly the way Tolkin and Rubin put it down on paper...this can be a hell of a film. Something that you have to tell your friends and family to see because it's that good.

Deep Impact wasn't good for me. This is supposed to be a story of how a small number of people face the end of the world. This is important because in the script it's never really the characters who're facing their own individual deaths; instead, you're supposed to feel this invisible, crushing-depth pressure forcing itself down on the characters. In the script in-between those lines you feel the sense that this comet is going to wipe away civilization forever. The movie instead falters with this; instead you're left with the sense that this is a really big problem but it'll work itself out in the end.

This is a movie that had the promise to be a helluva lot more than just an "ok" movie to see Friday night. There's whole parts of the script that are gone that could have brought home the tragedy of what was happening. Scenes and snippets of dialog that were like gold but now you'll never see them:

I don't think Mimi Leder is a bad director but I do think she wasn't the right director for this picture. I'm not privy to the reasons why the decisions to divert from the script were made; running CA is kind of like being an air traffic controller: you're monitoring many aircraft all at once and getting email from some of the passengers, ground crew and even flight crew but you don't know what's really going on inside those planes like the people inside do. And yeah, it's incredibly bloody arrogant of me to criticize this film simply because I never walked in the director (or producer, or actor, or so on) shoes. I get to do something no other film reviewers can get away it and it's pure evil to moviemakers: I can be critical of the finished film by judging it against the many different phases of existence it had. By doing this, it's like judging multiple versions of Deep Impact against the one that's out there right now. But I can also see how a so-so script goes on to become an exceptional film because of the inspired directing, casting, cinematography, costumes, or other element that gets added to it. Attending a film now is a chance to experience either a wonderful surprise or an unfortunate dissapointment.

But I am speaking as someone who read the script and placed it as the number one pick on my "Want to See" list for '98. I don't think knowing what was going to happen spoils the enjoyment of the picture for me, but the negative advance feedback warned me that this could be the case. It's a incredibly hard process to make a film, and an incredibly easy process to pass judgement on it. But when you are making a film you want as much magic on your side as possible before you commit to one frame. You hope more magic will come from your crew and cast when you shoot it, edit it, score it and market it. But if there's magic already in the script, why the hell remove it???

What I read was one of the best scripts of the decade and what I saw was just another 'alright' movie. Believe me when I tell you...it could have been so much more.

The new "Godzilla" is out of the bag

Sony Pictures attempts to keep the image of the creature under wraps until May 20th have fallen apart. Some stores have already placed their Godzilla merchandise out on the racks for consumers to purchase. Items such as the film's Official magazine, t-shirts, stickers and toys have all been erroneously sold last week -- and the images of the creature are avaliable all over the Web now -- images that look like a "false" design Godzilla producer has denied as the real deal. Check out our Godzilla page for continuing coverage of the hype surrounding the film.

Patrick Sauriol
Creator, Chief Content Writer & Director
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