The year 2023 brought us the summer of Barbenheimer, where two entirely different movies went head-to-head at the box office. But 25 years earlier, the summer of 1998 was marked by a very different dynamic when two movies with nearly identical plots battled it out for apocalyptic dominance.
Both Armageddon and Deep Impact are about a comet headed on a collision course with Earth. They both also focus on the U.S. government’s effort to stop the comet by having astronauts land on it, drill bombs into its center, and blow it up while still in space. Armageddon would end up as the clear winner in the battle, as the crowd-pleasing Michael Bay movie pulled in about $200 million more than Deep Impact, which was produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Mimi Leder (Pay It Forward). But while Armageddon is more entertaining, Deep Impact is the better movie, which is precisely why it’s worth checking out while it’s available for free on Tubi.
To cover a variety of perspectives on the global catastrophe, Deep Impact mostly focuses on four different characters. Téa Leoni plays a journalist for MSNBC who manages to get the scoop that a comet is headed for Earth before the public knows about it. Morgan Freeman plays the president of the United States who must lead his people through the crisis. Robert Duvall plays the commander of the spacecraft tasked with blowing up the comet. Elijah Wood is the young stargazer who discovers the comet and becomes its namesake; his struggles mostly represent how the general public is handling the looming calamity.
Three of these four throughlines remain engaging throughout. Especially good is Freeman’s story as the president, an idealistic, calming leader not dissimilar to Bill Pullman’s character in Independence Day. He’s the kind of movie president you want to have as a real-life commander in chief. Leoni and Duvall’s stories in the film are satisfactory, while Wood’s teenage drama about him and his girlfriend gets sappy at times. Overall, the characters in Deep Impact are not as fun to watch as Bruce Willis and his wrecking crew of colorful oil drillers-turned-astronauts in Armageddon, but they do carry more dramatic weight. With Armageddon, it’s all played so light that there’s little fear things won’t turn out alright in the end, whereas Deep Impact depicts enough things going wrong that you do actually start to wonder if Earth will be destroyed in the movie.
Which brings me to Deep Impact’s greatest strength over Armageddon: its story. While the two movies have near identical premises, they take vastly different approaches after a certain point. With Armageddon, pretty much the whole movie builds up to the astronauts blowing up the comet. There are fun training montages along the way and the final sequence is about that big explosion (again, this is a Michael Bay movie), which ultimately succeeds in destroying the comet, even if a few astronauts bite the cosmic dust along the way.
Deep Impact, however, has the astronauts reach the comet about halfway through the movie, and when they detonate the bombs, the comet only splits in two, with both pieces still headed towards Earth. That’s when the movie gets really interesting, as it becomes about the contingency plans set up by the government to keep things going after an extinction-level event. In the movie, the President reveals that a million Americans will be chosen to survive at an underground facility in Missouri, with 200,000 scientists and other purposefully-selected people joined by 800,000 average citizens chosen at random.
With just one million people selected to survive and the nearly 300 million other Americans sentenced to death, the movie explores some really interesting dynamics. One character dies by suicide, another makes a heroic sarifice by giving up their spot, all while American society descends into violence and protests. While the movie doesn’t depict the chaos as thoroughly as it should, just the ideas being explored are far more interesting than anything presented in Armageddon.
Back in May 1998, Deep Impact was a success for all of the reasons listed here, earning nearly $350 million. But when Armageddon arrived two months later and made over $550 million, Deep Impact was relegated to the shadow of its competitor. Decades later, the dynamic remains the same, with Armageddon remembered as a fun romp (with the funniest DVD commentary track in history) and Deep Impact remembered as that other comet movie that came out at the same time as Armageddon.
If you’re looking for a fun popcorn movie about worldwide destruction, you’re probably better off with Armageddon. But if you’re looking for a more thoughtful take on the matter — which still has a healthy amount of destruction to quench your disaster movie thirst — check out Deep Impact while it’s free to do so.
(Though feel free to fast forward through the Elijah Wood parts.)
Deep Impact is streaming on Tubi.
