His very important job grants him outsize authority over disasters, and, hoo boy, do he and a seismologist played by Anne Heche have a doozy of a problem on their hands here. Tommy Lee Jones, in classic The Fugitive mode here as a Los Angeles emergency management specialist, barks orders with a puckish grin and generally chews scenery, a stronger force of nature than even the titular lava-spewing volcano.
It's a disaster movie that's actually bleak and it's all the better for it. Sure, there's technically a happy ending, but the most indelible image from the movie is Téa Leoni's journalist hugging her estranged father as they are engulfed by a tidal wave with no possibility of survival. Essentially, the last hour of this movie is people tenderly saying goodbye to their loved ones. After a first act featuring a space mission to stop the deadly comet led by Robert Duvall, Leder mostly turns her attention to the souls back on Earth grappling with the sacrifices that must be made in times of crisis.
Coming out the same summer as Armageddon, Deep Impact has been historically overshadowed by Michael Bay's more macho take on the astronomical-object-will-destroy-us-all trope, and side-by-side, they're indicative of how a director's point of view can shape similar material. It's one of the reasons why this notorious second fiddle is one of the most soulful entries in the genre. It's rare that a disaster movie actually stops to consider the sadness inherent in an actual disaster, but Mimi Leder's Deep Impact does.
While the film’s special effects were impressive for the mid-2000s, the over-the-top "what if?" scenario spawned a slew of imitators that envisioned similarly quick descents into glacial epochs. 20th Century Foxĭisaster-movie specialist Roland Emmerich got some heat (no pun intended) from scientists upon the release of this blockbuster starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal-but we can wholeheartedly recommend it for entertainment purposes, even though, according to (real) paleoclimatologist William Hyde, the film is "to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery." The ice-age phenomenon portrayed in the film is a result of melting ice caps and a chaotic array of global super storms-in the realm of possibility, but not in its actual depiction, where a natural doomsday suddenly transforms the world into complete chaos, especially in Manhattan, where high-school academic decathlete Gyllenhaal is forced to shelter at the New York Public Library while also fending off ravenous zoo wolves as he waits for paleoclimatologist daddy Quaid to rescue him.
Brosnan's scientific concerns are undermined by his boss's political decision to suppress the truth about a potential eruption, so as to minimize pushback from locals over the economic impact it might have, and only accepts facts once the ash and lava start spewing forth, far too late to get everyone out alive, including himself. This movie also boasts some choice '90s nostalgia, including Grant Heslov's coffee-obsessed geologist during Starbucks' post-grunge-era surge, but adds in some commentary relevant to our current pandemic.
For one thing, Dante's Peak-which follows a sad volcanologist played by Pierce Brosnan, fresh off his debut as James Bond in GoldenEye, as he becomes increasingly Chicken Little-y about the titular mountain's likelihood to blow its top and wipe out a tiny Northwest town whose mayor is played by Linda Hamilton-concerns an actual volcano. Just like the twinned apocalyptic-object movies Deep Impact and Armageddon a year later, the lava-centric thrillers Dante's Peak and Volcano arrived in theaters only a few months apart in 1997 and don't have much in common beyond their inherent existential threat.