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# Tubi Review: Deep Impact (1998) – A Nostalgic 90s Favorite with Major Realism Creaks
We are kicking off a brand-new month of free streaming reviews on Tubi with a total 90s disaster heavyweight: *Deep Impact*.
Released during an era when Hollywood was absolutely obsessed with the idea of giant space rocks ending humanity, this film tries to blend high-stakes political tension with heart-wrenching human drama. But looking at it today, how well does its vision of survival actually hold up?
Let’s dive into the plot and look at what works—and what completely falls apart.
### The Setup: Spotting the Threat
The movie kicks off with a teenage amateur astronomer, Leo Biederman (played by a very young Elijah Wood), spotting an unfamiliar object in the night sky. It turns out to be a massive, seven-mile-wide comet on a direct collision course with Earth. The government naturally keeps this a complete secret for an entire year to prevent global panic.
**My Take:**
First of all, even today, we can still only track a certain percentage of the asteroids and comets out there. The idea of a rogue rock sneaking up on us was definitely a lot more believable back in the 90s. If you tried to sell this plot to an audience nowadays, with our advanced space telescopes and automated, global sky-scanning systems, it would be a much harder sell.
As for the cast, I love the characters in this movie. When you see a young Elijah Wood on screen, he plays that vulnerable, geeky character so perfectly that you instantly just want to go watch *Lord of the Rings*! The fact that the government kept it a secret for a year is also highly believable—because if there is one thing the government loves to do, it's keep secrets.
### The Turning Point: The Media Leak
The secret unravels when an ambitious journalist named Jenny Lerner accidentally stumbles onto the story while investigating a politician's supposed affair with a mistress named "Ellie." She quickly realizes "E.L.E." isn't a woman, but a government acronym for an *Extinction-Level Event*. This forces the President (Morgan Freeman) to step up to the podium and announce the terrifying truth to the world.
**My Take:**
Now, this part is completely unbelievable. I don't believe this would ever happen in real life. Unless it were a Republican president, I simply don't buy it. If it were a Democrat president, the mainstream media would hide the story because they wouldn't want it hurting their news station or the administration. They would go along with the cover-up because the media landscape leans heavily in that direction, and that's just what they do.
The idea that a mainstream reporter would press that hard for a story like this is pure fiction. In reality, she would be immediately ordered by the higher-ups at the network to bury the story to protect the political narrative. If we had a Democratic president and a Democratic congress, they would die before covering a scandal or a crisis of this magnitude. This entire plot point falls completely flat on realism.
### The Climax: The Messiah Mission
In a desperate, last-ditch bid to save the planet, a team of brave astronauts is sent into space aboard an experimental spacecraft called the *Messiah*. Their high-stakes mission is to land directly on the moving comet, drill deep into its icy core, and detonate nuclear bombs to destroy it from the inside out.
**My Take:**
Slapping explosives on a comet to save the world seemed to be a massive theme back then, but realistically, the technology just wasn't there. I don't think even Elon Musk could devise a rocket capable of doing that nowadays, let alone a team in 1998! We are talking about the pre-internet era of floppy disks and corded wall phones. Come on—do they really expect us to believe 1990s tech could pull off an interstellar drilling mission?
Plus, you can't keep a project like the *Messiah* a secret. Even if you housed it and built it entirely underground, people talk. Leaks would have slipped out left, right, and center long before launch.
Interestingly, growing up as a kid before the internet existed, I vividly remember being told that an asteroid was going to come and end the world in my lifetime. I don't even know where I first heard it, but they definitely warned us. Hollywood was clearly tapping into that exact cultural anxiety.
### Final Verdict
When you strip away the sci-fi fantasy, *Deep Impact* is undeniably unrealistic and full of massive, logic-defying plot holes. But you know what? I had to watch it again anyway, because at the end of the day, it is just a genuinely good movie. It's an entertaining, nostalgic time capsule that delivers great character performances, even if the science and politics are pure science fiction.
**Rating: A flawed, nostalgic 90s disaster classic worth a rewatch on Tubi.**
