Deep Impact started life as a When Worlds Collide remake and even kept the same date of the apocalypse, but people really only remember two things about it. One is that it came out the same year as Armageddon, though it's the thinking man's version (and thus, did not do as well). The other is that it featured Morgan Freeman as the U.S. President and along with President Palmer on 24, helped normalize the idea of an African-American in that position. Maybe you remember Elijah Wood on a bike. Definitely forgettable is Téa Leoni, droning through exposition, unconvincing as a journalist/news anchor. Overall, the film smartly imagines what would happen if (in this case) a comet were to head for Earth, updated to the realities of 1998, with a bit of disaster movie effects and a streak of optimism. The large cast of recognizable faces tells many stories, personal and epic, of varying interest, definitely better at the procedural stuff and the astronauts' mission than it is at the sappy melodrama of Leoni and Wood's stories.

As much as Armageddon was the blockbuster, more action-packed disaster flick, I think I almost like this one a tad more. Mostly because of the slow burn scenes which really focus in on the impending deadline of Earth's demise. The movie spends a bit of time on those scenes and so you kind of end up thinking how life would seem if it was all guaranteed to end in, say, a week.

Easily the far superior "Armageddon"...