The movie has been out on DVD for ages and now it's on Blu-Ray, and you can probably find a torrent for the whole movie that works. So, if you haven't seen it, you can, if you want to. It also shows up on cable once in awhile. If you don't want spoilers, don't read any further.
The gist of the movie is this: A teenager named Leo Biederman is the first to notice a new comet. He doesn't know it's a comet, but he sends the data to a professional astronomer who finds out what it is and where it is going: Close to Earth, close enough so that it might hit.
Cut to a year later and an ambitious young reporter named Jenny Lerner stumbles onto what she thinks is another sex scandal that's caused a cabinet member to resign. But the real reason he quit is that he knows the comet will probably hit the Earth, and he doesn't think anything the Administration is doing will really work to stop it or allow anyone to survive. Jenny gets picked up by the FBI before she gets back to her people, and the President makes a deal with her to keep quiet for a couple of days until he can get together a formal announcement. This is, of course, a big boost for her career, and it makes Leo Biederman suddenly famous.
The President reveals a plan to stop the comet involving using a big spaceship called the Messiah carrying six astronauts and some thermonuclear weapons to intercept the comet. The ship is being built in orbit and is almost ready. It will depart in another two months, and intercept the comet eight months after that--four months before the comet might hit. Most of the country (and by implication, the world) buys into this.
Messiah gets to the comet on schedule and plants four of the bombs. One of the astronauts gets killed and one is blinded in the process. The bombs detonate, but they neither knock the comet off course enough to miss, nor blow it into such small pieces few of them will hit Earth and none will penetrate its atmosphere. Instead, they blow it into two big pieces, one six miles long, and the other a mile and a half. They also mess up their spacecraft enough so they're out of communication with Earth until they get much closer.
After a few hours, with just about everyone everywhere watching, the President announces that Messiah hasn't stopped the comet after all. Then he reveals his backup plans. Basically, the United States, Russia, and everyone else with nukes and big rockets will shoot them off in a last-ditch attempt to divert the comets. But in the "remote possibility" that this doesn't work (it's pretty clear the President knows this is bullshit) the United States has been preparing a complex of deep shelters in the Ozarks large enough to hold a million people and keep them alive for two years, long enough to survive two years of global darkness caused by dust and soot in the atmopshere (and deep enough to survive firestorms, but those aren't mentioned.) 200,000 people have been "pre-selected"; the other 800,000 will be picked in a national lottery only five days before the comets strike.
Leo's family has been preselected. But his girlfriend and her family haven't, so he marries her and petitions to have her family evacuated along with his own. But when the evacuation bus arrives--with a heavy military escort--her family is not on the list. She gets hysterical and refuses to get on the bus without her family, and Leo's parents push him on the bus. Leo's dad's best line in the movie is when he tells Sarah's father "Chuck, we'll work it out when we get there." Of course, when they get there, the military is using machine guns to keep people without passes from getting in. Leo leaves his family and starts hitchhiking back to his home in Richmond, Virginia. His wife's family lives on the same block.
The missile barrage doesn't work; both comets are going to hit. Leo knows this from a battery-operated TV owned by one of the migrant farm workers he's hitching at dawn on the day of the impacts. They stop to watch the President's announcement. Somehow he makes it back to Richmond, only to find Sarah's family gone. But Sarah's dad's dirt bike is still there, so he sets out looking for her on the roads to high ground--realistically, the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are about a hundred miles away. The tsunami from the first comet is supposed to be anywhere from 1000 to 3000 feet high when it comes ashore. Leo actually finds Sarah's family on the road about an hour before the first impact. Her parents give her the baby and send them off with Leo because they are stuck in traffic, along with everyone else on four wheels.
Meanwhile Jenny Lerner is still at her desk in Washington. She gives up her seat on the last helicopter out to a colleague who has a small child.
The smaller comet does hit. The Messiah crew makes a kamikaze attack with the last of the nukes (they couldn't do it earlier because they didn't have the arming codes) and blow the larger comet to bits about an hour from Earth. This means there won't be an Extinction Level Event--just the death of almost everyone along the North Atlantic coasts and inland for hundreds of miles.
The action climaxes with Leo, Sarah, and the baby along with maybe a dozen other lucky people scrambling to the top of a ridge just high enough and far enough back to escape the destruction below and to the east. This was the original end of the movie, but a coda was shot with a final speech by the President to the recovering nation. In this speech he mentions that the wave reached the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, which means it was high enough in the Appalachians to clear the Cumberland Water Gap, Elevation 1600 feet and more than 400 miles from the Atlantic (and about 350 miles from Richmond, Virginia, where Leo and Sarah were supposed to reside.)
Compared to Armageddon, this movie is a science class. We couldn't build anything as large as the Messiah in space in only a year in 1998 or now. Give us ten years and Apollo-grade funding and we probably would. There really was an Orion program which involved using atomic bombs to propel a very robust rocket, and Russia really did more engineering research into the concept. We have actually built an ion drive that works, but it was tiny and didn't have nearly enough specific impulse for the mission described. Our life support technology really isn't up to missions sixteen months long (assuming a return with live astronauts was figured in) but we would be willing to cut some corners. As Dr. Samuel Johnson observed three centuries ago, the prospect of being hanged in the near future concentrates a man's mind most wonderfully. Still, if I was making the movie, I would have nixed the astronauts. Blowing it up an hour from Earth wouldn't have made much difference in reality; it might have even made things worse by baking about half the earth as the atmosphere absorbed all those fragments. The best place for a push from nuclear weapons (or anything else) would have been at perhelion, the comet's closest approach to the Sun. That would been around a hundred million miles from Earth, and about two months before the comets were scheduled to hit.
The comets were supposed to arrive three hours apart. It would be an incredible co-incidence if they both hit Earth that far apart. They would be travelling at around 30 miles per second, which means they would be around 324,000 miles apart. The earth moves about 200,000 miles along its orbit in three hours, more than 25 times its own diameter. The gimmick of the large-and-small fragment was a compromise allowing for an impact but providing for heroic action to save the rest of us from extinction.
The space sequences were quite well done if not entirely believable. I think it would have been a better movie without them. The focus of the film is not what's happening out there but what's going to happen to us down here. Even the director Mimi Leder admits the conflict set up between the veteran astronaut played by Robert Duvall with the younger crew members was a mistake; real NASA people look on Apollo astronauts with incredible respect. That aside, the performances were very good; its just that they distract from what really matters in the story: What happens to the rest of us.
What really stuck in my craw, and not only in my craw, is that at the end of the movie, we don't know what happened to Leo, Sarah, and that baby. If they had ended it with the shot of the waters receding, it would have been all right, but bringing in the coda speech gives us long enough to wonder why they aren't anywhere in that scene. There's nothing left of civilization in sight from their ridgeline, Sarah's dropped the bag with the baby's formula and diapers, and no one else on that ridge even has a backpack. Many cubic miles of seawater have been vaporized, which means very big storms will be coming along soon. The most likely outcome is that these people will all die from exposure unless they are rescued in a day or two, and there are millions of people who need rescuing just as much. If the floodwaters reached the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, they would have inundated every valley in the Appalachians, which means there isn't a usable road network any more, and most of the airports are gone. All they would have had to do is show one shot Leo and Sarah in the crowd listening the speech, or watching it on TV or listening it to it on the radio somewhere, and it would have settled the problem, and it wouldn't have broken the budget.
In fact, although this movie had about half the budget for Armagedden, it was still one of the most expensive movies of 1998 and a lot of the money went into expensive special effects. The biggest chunk went into a spectacular destruction of New York City. It's wonderfully done, and you can find around fifty versions of it on YouTube by now. But it's completely wasted effort. There is only one character in the movie who has any connection to New York City, and Mimi Leder edited so severely it's impossible to notice that he's in the city for any normal human (It's Bruce Weitz playing Stuart Caley, and he's shown for maybe two seconds as the wave hits him. He's the one with the Paper with the headline "Comet to New York: Drop Dead," a parody of a real headline when President Gerald Ford refused to give Mayor Abraham Beame any federal help to get New York City out of a desperate budget crisis in the 1970s.
It could have been a better movie with a smaller budget. Mimi Leder says she spent a lot of time watching On the Beach, but she didn't put enough of Beach in the movie. Without a special effects budget and, yes, without salaries for Robert Duvall and especially for Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell (Neither of which had much screen time), the story could have focused on the President and the government, Jenny and the media, and Leo and Sarah and their families, ordinary people caught up in a crisis they can't do much about. The point of On the Beach was how people would live when they knew they didn't have any hope. The special effects and the glitzy space-rescue part took too much away from that.
My wife hates Tea Leoni and she has lots of company. I'm not a real fan of her work, although I haven't seen too much of it. But I disagree with complaints about her performance in Deep Impact. She was supposed to be playing a conflicted character and that is exactly what she did. He early scenes are wonderful, showing how ambitious she is, how the woman she is working under is holding her back, how excited she is to discover there's more to the sex scandal than she thought there was--and yet, she's also smart enough to suspect that it has to be more than a sex scandal.
Jenny's character really starts to go off track when her father and his new wife are brought in. The lingering problems between her mother and her father are absolutely trivial compared to the crisis. Schell's character doesn't work at all; we don't even know why he lives around Washington; we have no time to build up either sympathy or resentment toward him. Jenny's plea for him to get back together with his mother was an incredible slip. It was even worse in the original script, where it was clear that they had actually been divorced for fifteen years. Editing produced an impression that he had only recently dumped his wife for a younger woman. Leoni acted her scenes very well; the problem is, they just are not believable in context. It's not her acting that's muddled, it's the writing and editing.
Jenny was supposed to have a love interest in the cameraman, Erik Vennakor, but that was edited out, too, and that wasn't a mistake. The scenes that were written weren't necessary and didn't advance the plot or develop Jenny's character. Maybe a better idea would have been to make Jenny a lesbian who is or has been one of Beth Stanley's lovers. That way there could be an extra factor to the resentment when Jenny leapfrogs Beth with her scoop, and it would have added more weight to Jenny's decision to give up her ticket to survival to Beth and her child. Laura Innes was already playing a lesbian character on ER when the movie was in production, and she's never shown as having any personal connection with any males. But, of course, homophobia is still very much alive and well, so you probably couldn't sell this to the money men behind a big production like this one, even today.
Check out Impact:Earth for some real idea of what a comet like Biederman could do. Make the diameter 2500 meters, the density 1500 kg/m^3, and set the velocity anywhere between 40 and 72 km/sec. Set water depth to 5000 meters for an ocean impact capable of raising monster waves. This is more or less the comet strike shown in the movie. If it was actually as close to Cape Hatteras as shown, it would have set most of Virginia and Maryland on fire, besides the Carolinas, but it would have raised negligible waves.
