Mimi Leder
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Connections, in both directions
The latter is on full display in "Greenland" where the title certainly sounds benign and sort of "let's go on vacation" dreamy compared to its similarly themed predecessors "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" where a celestial object is certain to cast a shadow on Annie singing about there always being tomorrow to look forward to.
Both the synopsis and the start of the film reminded me slightly of an old favorite of mine, Deep Impact (1998).
With plenty of soul-searching, Greenland is reminiscent of Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998) which is largely considered to be far superior to the brash and risibly over the top Armageddon .
It’s as if Waugh wants to channel popcorn tear-jerkers like “Deep Impact” with arthouse meditations like Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia,” while hanging on to a small budget.
That’s as a result of the decision to eschew the multi-character approach, and the bombastic, apocalypse porn of previous killer-comet movies like 1998’s double whammy of Deep Impact and Armageddon (okay, asteroid in the latter).
As well as the aforementioned Strangelove and Armageddon , Don’t Look Up also has echoes of Deep Impact , Network , Wag the Dog , Bob Roberts and Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, as banging their heads against a brick wall of bureaucracy – and a divided public, some of whom believe it all to be a massive conspiracy theory – takes its toll on the protagonists.
Don’t Look Up is essentially Deep Impact played for yuks, Armageddon if it had a brain.
We are jolted along by an end-of-days blockbuster like “Deep Impact” (the art-house-inclined can throw in “Melancholia”) but also swept up in a behind-the-scenes realpolitik farce like “Dr.
Unlike disaster films like Deep Impact and Armageddon , nobody in the presidential administration gives a damn.
As seen in Armageddon , Deep Impact , Independence Day, and so forth, the scientist discovers the doomsday maker, and the attention slowly shifts to the “real” heroes: the brawny brave astronauts tasked with saving the planet.
A House of Dynamite (2025)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
influenced by Deep Impact (1998)
Plot Characters
“Deep Impact” (1998) and “2012” (2009) are trash but, so help me, I was invested in them.
Morgan Freeman has been perfectly presidential in Deep Impact and the … Has Fallen thrillers.
Idris Elba, who enters the pantheon of Black presidents presiding over cataclysms that includes Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact (1998), Danny Glover in 2012 (2009), and Tommy Lister Jr. as Galactic President of the Federated Territories in The Fifth Element (1997).
A thousand-foot-high tidal wave swamps the East Coast, and I couldn't help thinking of the parting of the Red Sea ( "The Ten Commandments" ).
But the effects computers at Industrial Light and Magic are working overtime, too, producing cataclysmic shots reminiscent of Titanic , Twister, and even The Ten Commandments.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
influenced by Deep Impact (1998)
Themes Plot Visuals
Remember the scene in Deep Impact when Tea Leoni and Maximilian Schell wait on the beach for the tidal wave to kill them?
The Day After Tomorrow is on several levels poorly made and dramatically juvenile, but the whole movie wisely showcases the strong, sober intuitions at its core: it's like Deep Impact as made by Michael Moore, and that's a good thing, or a good enough thing.
Having seen all of the epic disaster films of the 1970s – what might be called the Irwin Allen era – (featuring The Towering Inferno, Airport, The Poseidon Adventure and others), and the occasional disaster revival film of the 1980s (When Time Ran Out) and 1990s (Deep Impact, The Perfect Storm), I’d say that this Roland Emmerich movie must be considered among the best.
And just as the New York rainstorm forces city residents to seek out higher ground, the metropolis is nearly wiped out by a massive tidal wave (think of the "Deep Impact" climax taken down a slight notch).
Independence Day wasn’t exactly a fountain of logic and neither were Twister or Deep Impact .
The impressive CGI devastation includes a Russian freighter floating up Fifth Avenue during a giant tidal surge, the Statue of Liberty covered in an icy crust and the "Hollywood" sign crumpling in a Los Angeles tornado, albeit reminiscent of "Twister," "The Core," "Deep Impact," "Armageddon," "Vertical Limit," etc..
White House Down (2013)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
influenced by Deep Impact (1998)
Plot Characters
In an echo of the spring of 1997, when "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano" promised moviegoers death by lava, and the summer of 1998, when "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" threatened audiences with extinction via asteroid, "White House Down" arrives three months and a week after "Olympus Has Fallen," a very similar story about a tough agent turned rescuer/avenger after circumstances trap him inside the White House during an armed assault that -- worst case scenario -- could escalate into nuclear war.
When we think back to other disaster film presidents, we find people like Morgan Freeman (“Deep Impact”), Bill Pullman (“Independence Day”), and Danny Glover (“2012”), all of whom seem like they really could be the president.
Garcia’s bitsy performance reminded of Morgan Freeman, also playing POTUS, in 1998’s Deep Impact, a film – like Michael Bay’s Armageddon, released the same year – about an attempt to save the world by nuking a comet.
The debut screenplay from Grant Nieporte, whose previous credits includes three combined episodes of TV�s Sabrina the Teenage Witch and 8 Simple Rules, maintains its mysterioso Pay It Forward-like mentality for the first few scenes, but once those restraints are obviously lifted (no later than Ben signing a particularly titled form) it is still under the impression that its hiding from us in an effort to hammer home a resolution that is absent of any poignancy whatsoever and would be laughed off an episode of ER.
Smith’s reunion with director Gabriele Muccino (the far more tolerable “The Pursuit of Happyness”) is basically “Pay It Forward” meets “Babel.”
Hollywood often bum rushes a theme for our amusement, from dueling asteroid movies in the ’90s – “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” – to the two upcoming “Snow White” movies.
And yet, in much the same way that "Armageddon" proved to be the better asteroid-attacking-Earth movie despite appearing several months after "Deep Impact," "Friends with Benefits" is by far the better of the two films--partly because it, unlike "No Strings Attached," is completely Greta Gerwig-free and partly because, unlike "No Strings Attached," it has bigger laughs, better chemistry between the two leads and it stays afloat longer before succumbing to the seas of conventionality.
"Nearly" because, just as in "Armageddon" or "Deep Impact," the plucky humans are able to put aside their differences and blow the threat out of the sky.
Among all of the U.S. presidents we’ve seen in film – Morgan Freeman sold it in “Deep Impact” and “Olympus Has Fallen” and so did Bill Pullman in “Independence Day” – James has got to be the worst one.
If you don’t think you’ve seen it, you have, because just in recent years it’s been in Twister, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Volcano, War of the Worlds, Independence Day and, now, San Andreas.
What do you get when you cross "When Worlds Collide," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Deep Impact?"
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
influenced by Deep Impact (1998)
Plot
When it’s announced that a space mission to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth (shades of “Armageddon’’ and “Deep Impact’’) has failed, Dodge’s wife runs off with a man with whom she’s already been having an affair.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
Directed by Zack Snyder
influenced by The Peacemaker (1997)
Themes
Think of all the bombed-out villages and devastated families that helped birth the bad guys in movies like The Peacemaker and Three Kings.
While the rest of the Eternals are trying to save humanity from a extinction level event – thank you Deep Impact !
It’s as if movies like One Fine Day and The Peacemaker (the latter heavily featured in the Kelly montage, if I’m not mistaken) became signature smashes, and Clooney never branched out into socially-conscious directing or the elder-statesman gravitas to understand his slow, natural fade.
Jay sits through a show reel of George Clooney’s finest moments, from The Peacemaker…
The clips during the Jay Kelly tribute include scenes from Combat Academy, Sunset Beat, ER, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Peacemaker, The Thin Red Line, Out of Sight, Three Kings, Intolerable Cruelty, Ocean’s Twelve, Syriana, The Good German, Michael Clayton, Leatherheads, Burn After Reading, Up in the Air, The American, and The Midnight Sky.
…all the films pulled from Clooney’s actual career (with a curiously hefty amount of footage from 1997’s The Peacemaker)…
…during the climactic montage of his work that includes clips from such real-life Clooney landmarks as Leatherheads, The Peacemaker, and…did I spot One Fine Day(?)
In a wonderful meta moment, clips rush on a screen from actual George Clooney films, going all the way back to 1997’s “The Peacemaker.”
The overall effect of "2012" is like being strapped into a chair in front of a three-by-three matrix of big-screen TVs playing "The Poseidon Adventure," " Earthquake ," "The Towering Inferno," "When Worlds Collide," "Airport '75," "Deep Impact," "Armageddon," "Meteor" and, yes, even "The Swarm"; not one after the other, either, but instead all at the same time.
The screenplay never quite does get around to fully explaining why the earth is ‘sploding, although it does hint it’s got something to do with the sun and that the One World Government learns about it far enough in advance to construct some Noah’s Arks and revisit the who-deserves-to-be-saved tension of Deep Impact.
Civilization has been threatened and/or exterminated in a variety of horrific ways: Alien invasion ("Independence Day"), zombie onslaught ("Dawn of the Dead"), weather run amok ("The Day After Tomorrow"), meteor strike ("Deep Impact"), rampant plague ("I Am Legend") and even aggressive vegetation ("The Happening").
Cusack is stripped of his usual laid-back charm amid the noise and Danny Glover's stoic President appears a cheap substitute for Morgan Freeman's Deep Impact commander in chief (he's seen one apocalypse too many, perhaps?).
Beauty and the Beast is like Pay it Forward, only with unnecessary overreactions.
Or a much different take on “Pay It Forward,” which is welcome, as that movie was terrible.