MY MOVIE SHELF: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 86 Days to go: 58

Movie #354:  The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Well, I’ve survived it. Again. We’ve come to the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I couldn’t be more grateful. The subtitles really do help a lot in the understanding (and even enjoyment) of the films, but 1) that shouldn’t be a requirement for a film in (mostly) my native language, and 2) they’re still pretty ridiculous, as far as films go.

The enormity of the task Peter Jackson and company took on and accomplished is not to be swept aside, for it was gigantic and ambitious. That he managed to film three such huge, world-spanning, epic films all at the same time is a feat that will likely never be matched. The special effects throughout the films were impressive and innovative to a stunning degree, and creatures that existed only digitally blended seamlessly into the landscape with human actors. I don’t mean to undercut it at all. That’s why The Return of the King won all the Oscars. I personally wouldn’t have given it all the Oscars, but I can understand why it got them. I don’t really begrudge it that.

What I do begrudge it, however, is the story. Maybe this is largely the fault of author J.R.R. Tolkien, or maybe it falls to the filmmakers, but there are enormous holes in this mess. Like why isn’t the giant, climactic battle of Gondor the actual climax of the film? There’s another hour or more after all is said and done with this battle they’ve been building to for two films. The evilest of evil dudes, who can’t be killed by man, is dead (we’ll get to that in a bit), and the land of Men is saved, and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) has returned to be rightful king, and still there’s a ton left to do. In fact, right around the time this battle to end all battles winds down, Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are escaping the tower of Mordor together, only to still be about a hundred miles away from the damn mountain as the crows (or shall we say eagles? EAGLES!) fly.

Speaking of that tower of Mordor, why did the Orcs take Frodo up there? Why didn’t they leave him cocooned in spiderweb to be eaten by whatsherface? Just one more pointless obstacle for these hobbits to face? I mean, entire countries have been won and lost in at least three battles since those two split off from the rest of their fellowship, with everyone and their brother traipsing back and forth across the entirety of Middle Earth a dozen times or more, yet they’re still making their way. Slowly, but surely, with a half-dead Frodo, who’s now been stabbed nearly to death three times, will lose a finger before all is said and done, and still can’t just die in the lava of Mount Doom like he most definitely should. (Oh yeah, and how is it that Gollum, voiced by Andy Serkis, can fall down a bottomless gulch and still beat the fucking hobbits to the mountain?? What the fuck?!?) So why is it, exactly, that these magical eagles — the eagles from Deus ex Machina-land who show up  over Mordor to lend assistance to the final army in the final (no really this time) battle — couldn’t have taken the ring, or Frodo, or the entire fucking fellowship into Morder to drop the ring into Mount Doom? Oh, no reason. Are you kidding me??

And as far as that final battle goes — the real, actual final battle, not the one they build up to like it’s the climax of anything — why are the ghost fighters not there? Why did Aragorn release them early? Why didn’t he just employ them from the start? I mean, ghost fighting probably would’ve been pretty impressive, but in actuality all you see is a green wave of death going over the opponents and then it’s over. So why didn’t they just start there? Send the eagles to drop the ring, send the ghost army to take out all the orcs, and be done? Why have we sat through three neverending movies when it could’ve been over in a moderately-lengthed one?

I have to say, the murder of that unkillable witch-king was pretty impressive with Eowyn (Miranda Otto) all, “I am no man!” (Or it would’ve been, if it had come at the end like a normal climax.) But even that was telegraphed from about a thousand miles away. I didn’t even know her name the first time I watched these things, but when Gandalf (Ian McKellen) makes a huge point about the fact that “no living man can kill him,” it wasn’t hard to figure out the rest. I mean, gee, is there a woman of substance in this whole thing who isn’t an elf? Oh yeah, that one, who already foreshadowed how good she is with a sword two movies and, like, seven and a half hours ago. It must be her. Because in Middle Earth, when it comes to any single woman actually doing anything, THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE. (Wait, that’s Highlander. Whatever.)

Then, finally, to compensate for neither of the two previous movies having an ending at all, this one has approximately five. There’s the fade to black after Sam and Frodo collapse on the rock in the sea of lava, but then it fades back in to show the eagles (!!!) picking them up, like no big deal. Then there’s Frodo waking up in Rivendell, and having all the members of the fellowship share a good chuckle over their rousing good time of many months worth of hardship and death, and fade to black again. Then, wait, Aragorn has to be crowned and say something kingly, followed by Legolas (Orlando Bloom) giving him an arched eyebrow at the mysterious figure hiding behind an Elvish banner, like WHO COULD IT BE?? Oh, it’s Arwen (Liv Tyler), miraculously not dead, and her and Aragorn start making out something fierce. Luckily, Eowyn has started eyeballing Faramir (David Wenham) now. And everyone bows down to the hobbits. Fade out AGAIN. Except, no, now Frodo takes up the end of the tale, and the hobbits head back to the shire thirteen months after leaving and share a drink while Sam goes to talk up some chick he likes. Fade out AGAIN. No, wait, now Frodo is talking about how misplaced he still feels, and he finishes up the writing of the tale a full four goddamn years after the whole thing started. Apparently Bilbo (Ian Holm) is still alive, so he accompanies him to Rivendell to go to the Undying Lands, only Frodo goes to, and gives the book to Sam. Then SAM winds up the telling of the tale and goes home to his wife, despite desperately needing to make out with Frodo, like, the entire movie, and takes his happy little family into his hobbit hole door. At long, long last, the end.

And it’s the end for me too. At least as far as The Lord of the Rings is concerned. I will never have to watch it again as long as I live. But I still have scores of movies left on my shelf, and I will continue on with them in the morning. Hopefully, I haven’t lost faith with all of you yet.

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 87 Days to go: 59

Movie #353:  The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is a movie without beginning or end. And by that I mean that it starts in the middle of things, and it ends in the middle of things. You aren’t even given the satisfaction of the story of Rohan or the claimed victory at Helm’s Deep, because at the end of the movie Sam (Sean Astin) is telling Frodo (Elijah Wood) how any victories or losses right now are not the end of the story, and there’s far, far more to go.

The Two Towers even backtracks a bit, starting off with Gandalf (Ian McKellen) fending off the thing in the mines from Fellowship, I suppose to show how he ended up not dead and turned into Gandalf the White, though in this first scene they frame it as a dream of Frodo’s. And Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) flashes back as well to the time in the first film when they were all in Rivendell and Arwen (Liv Tyler) was promising her heart to him. Better off her dad Elrond (Hugo Weaving) convinced her to head to the Undying Lands, though, the way Aragorn and Eowyn (Miranda Otto) make eyes at each other the whole second half of the film. (And again, Arwen and Eowyn are too closely related, sound-wise. Are there not the full complement of letters in Middle Earth?)

When I first saw this one in the theater, all I could really follow was the not-at-all subtle anti-industrialization allegory offered up by the tree people, which is pretty irritating. I mean, it’s an irritating attempt at profundity anyway, but it’s also irritating that the story is so hard to follow. It jumps back and forth, across multiple storylines and even more locations, and I simply can’t keep up. Even with the subtitles on tonight — a necessary function, if I’m able to follow a word — I still found it difficult to keep track of every character and every relationship and every motivation and every event. Though I did much better this time around, at least. Woo, subtitles!

Of course, subtitles are their own double-edged sword, because while they allow me to understand that Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) has jokes, and that he and Legolas (Orlando Bloom) have a bit of a playful rivalry, they also make it pretty clear that Gimli has turned into a bit of a joke himself, comic relief as the short little dwarf who can neither see a battle over a wall or jump into it from a ledge. Poor Gimli.

The primary achievement of The Two Towers, though, is Gollum, voiced and acted via motion-capture technology by Andy Serkis. The effects and the rendering of Gollum are exemplary, and I don’t take anything away from Serkis or from Peter Jackson and his whole special effects team with regard to this film or the other two, honestly. It’s a stunning achievement. I just … don’t care.

Not being a big fan of the hobbits to begin with, I’m unaffected by Frodo’s slow descent into madness or his sympathy for the man/creature Smeagol that Gollum used to be. I also don’t care about Sam’s endless attempts to reach Frodo or to thwart Gollum, though I do feel bad for Sean Astin being referred to as the “fat hobbit.” That’s rough. Honestly, as crazed and threatening as Gollum is, I kind of root for him in my own way. He’s far more interesting talking to himself than either of the hobbits are talking to each other, and the idea of “her” killing the two, thanks to Gollum’s manipulations, is a rare bright spot of hope in my journey through these movies.

And there is hope, for Two Towers is the Lord of the Rings film I hate the most, which means that Return of the King will be a slight improvement, and then I will be done with the whole enterprise. So let’s get to it.

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 88 Days to go: 59

Movie #352:  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Here is where I lose all of you who’ve come on this journey with me, for I hate The Lord of the Rings movies. I think they are tedious and overlong and hard to follow. I think if you didn’t read the books when you were young (which I didn’t), then you can’t possibly understand all that’s happening here. There is too much, and it is too tiresome.

The Fellowship of the Ring, for what it’s worth, is the one I hate the least (or the one I like the most, if that construct better suits you). It starts off with a ton of exposition and there is a lot of getting nowhere going on, but there are some good battles and high drama. (Although, without watching with subtitles on I wouldn’t know who half these people are. And didn’t, the first — and only other — time I saw the film. Even with subtitles on, how the hell am I supposed to know what “Crebain from Dunland” is? Those are not words that mean anything. You might as well speak nonsense at me for three hours.) This being my first exposure to any of Tolkien’s work, too, there was a certain amount of majesty and wonder in the rendering of the different beings from the different worlds. Elves and dwarves and hobbits were all new to me, so I did, once upon a time, enjoy being introduced to them. That time quickly passed, however.

As I said, I did not read the books as a child (or ever), so I had no prior associations with any of the characters. I came at the films completely fresh, which means that I was not predisposed to like or dislike anyone and I did not know any of what was coming and all allusions to events past or present are lost on me. I can only take what the movie gives me, and what I can decipher from it. To be honest, I think it leaves me at a bit of a loss, but that’s a failing on the film’s part.

I never really cared for the hobbits. They were always sort of gross creepy creatures, if you ask me, and the constant close-ups of Frodo (Elijah Wood) and his nasty fingernails weren’t doing him any favors. Other than the trick of making them so much shorter than everyone else, I have no interest to them. So the main, central sympathies of the film, and the champion relationship between Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin), is lost on me. I don’t care. Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), is quite interesting, however, and  from the moment he appears as the shadowy figure they call Strider (which does NOT help me follow who any of these billion people are), I rooted for him. I also like that he has some sort of tortured romance with Arwen (Liv Tyler, whose name I didn’t quite catch the first time through because Tolkien likes to use words that all sound exactly alike — I’m looking at you Sauron and Saruman), not that we really got into that at all. It was just kind of teased, hung out there like a carrot for me to follow through three of these damn movies.

There’s a badass scene of Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) imagining her power if she took hold of the ring, and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) sacrificing himself to that fiery thing in the mines was quite moving. I also really like the sort of rise and fall of Boromir (Sean Bean) as he goes after the ring one minute and then defends the hobbits from the orcs the next, dying (as Sean Bean is contractually obligated to do in every role he takes) heroically. But all those are sort of contained to this one film. They exist entirely within it, unlike almost everything else going on. And there’s a lot going on. For all the battles, all the trekking, all the losses and all the triumphs and all the grim resignation to the task, nobody gets anywhere. Frodo is practically stabbed to death twice in this one film, and still nothing happens. They take forever and a day to get to the part where the fellowship is formed, and then by the end of the film it’s completely broken apart. Sam and Frodo are in a boat on their own, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are captured by orcs, and Aragorn, Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) are a rag-tag assortment of warrior species off to maybe rescue them.

And just when you think something’s about to happen, and they’ll finally get on with this journey of theirs, the movie ends. It’s not an end to the story, mind you, just and end to the film. They’ve dragged it out as far as they possibly can, and now you have to wait another year before you find out if anyone ever actually gets anywhere on this quest.

Luckily (or unluckily) for me, I don’t have to wait a year, for the next one is upon us. Let’s see how much more I can hate The Two Towers, shall we?

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: Sin City

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 188  Days to go: 131

Movie #250:  Sin City

When Sin City came out, I admit I thought it was fantastic: dark, stylized, poetic. It was literally like a comic book come to life on screen. It’s been probably eight or nine years since I’ve seen it, though, and over that time, without even noticing it or thinking about it at all, my opinion changed. I didn’t even realize it had happened until I saw myself approaching the DVD on my shelf and felt myself fill with dread. If I wasn’t on a deadline and running far behind because of my Christmas acquisitions, I’d have put it off for days and days, there’s not even a question. As I thought about it, remembered the film I saw so many years ago, I realized that while the film is like a comic book come to life, it’s true, it actually doesn’t make any kind of sense. And as I watched it today, I realized how awful and brutal and affected it was.

The movie jumps around from the film noir narration of Detective Hartigan (Bruce Willis), to the rampaging revenge killings of the psychotic Marv (Mickey Rourke) to a murderous band of hookers led by Gail (Rosario Dawson), who looks like she’s part punk, part dominatrix. Jessica Alba is a rodeo stripper named Nancy, Brittany Murphy is a saucy waitress named Shellie, and Josh Hartnett likes to kill beautiful women. Also, Elijah Wood and Nick Stahl both play gross sickos. I’d go into more detail, but the movie doesn’t, really, so why bother? It’s just a jumbled mess.

There are lots of beheadings and ax murders and eviscerations or whatever, and blood looks really weird when it splatters in this weirdly selective color saturation aesthetic they’ve got going, that I’m sure is a product of the original comic. It’s impossibly gory and hard to watch.

However, there are some unintentionally funny parts. One, Nick Offerman has a tiny little role as some kind of heavy, and he sports a bright white buzz cut and goatee. If you recognize him, it’s a great for a chuckle. Two, Marv is unbelievably misogynistic while in the course of avenging a woman, and says all sorts of ridiculous things. First, he calls it ridiculous that Lucille (Carla Gugino) would be “a dyke” because “with a body like that, she could have any many she wanted.” You hear that, lesbians? Why would you want to sleep with women when men are available? Second, he “never hits girls” (unless it’s for her own good, then he’ll knock her completely out so he can torture the guy he captured in peace). I guess the guy has to have some standards?

Needless to say, this is not a movie I’ll be keeping around. The only thing worse than a craptacular film is a craptacular film that’s totally in love with itself. And Sin City is definitely that.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 278  Days to go: 270

Movie #99: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Last year, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind made it into the semifinals of Tomato Nation’s Cinemarch Madness bracket, in which voters pick the bleakest films of all time. It didn’t win, THANK GOD, but honestly I can’t believe it made it that far. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? That movie isn’t bleak. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is anything but bleak. It’s about how the people you love become part of you, and how even when you know it’s going to end, it’s absolutely crucial that you take the journey anyway. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about the enduring hopefulness of love.

The movie starts with Joel (Jim Carrey) waking up bleary-eyed, with that groggy, confused expression that comes from a too-deep sleep that goes on too long. Usually when that happens, you go to the bathroom and shake it off with a shower, but things for Joel are just … weird. His car has a huge dent in the driver’s side. He feels out of sorts. Waiting for the train in to work, he sprints the other direction and heads out to Montauk in February — Valentine’s Day, according to his voiceover. There he sees a fascinating girl with bright blue hair (Kate Winslet) — she’s on the beach, in the diner, and eventually on the train. She introduces herself as Clementine, but please don’t make any jokes about her name. Not a problem, because Joel doesn’t know any. He doesn’t seem to have heard the name Clementine ever before, in any capacity. They’re getting off at the same stop, and Joel drives her home. They have a drink. He calls her up as soon as he gets home and wishes her a happy Valentine’s Day. They make plans to see each other the next night, when they will go up to Boston to lie on the frozen Charles River. Clementine excites Joel, makes him feel alive. He is drawn to her vivaciousness, her spontaneity, and her uniqueness. Clementine assures him they’ll be married one day.

This prologue is followed by the opening credits, in which Joel is sobbing in his car. The driver’s side is still dented, so it must be after, and yet when he goes to check his mail, his neighbor asks what Joel intends to do with Clementine for Valentine’s Day. Tomorrow. Has a year passed? The movie doesn’t say. It lets you figure it out.

With direction by Michel Gondry and a brilliant script from Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a visual and psychological masterpiece. I’ve talked before about how Alice in Wonderland creates a very successful dream sequence, but Eternal Sunshine surpasses it by a mile — multiple miles. After all, Alice in Wonderland is animated, so anything imaginable could easily be drawn into existence and put on screen. Eternal Sunshine is all live action, making it much harder to bend time and space the way they do. And they do it so well. Sets are circular and built like an Escher painting, so if Joel runs one way in his apartment, suddenly he’s back where he started and Clementine is somewhere else. If he turns around, suddenly she’s going the opposite direction. Words disappear from signs and from books. Faces become blurry and obscured. At one point, Elijah Wood’s character Patrick has no face at all, just a back of his head, no matter which way you turn him. At another, his eyes are upside-down. Voices from inside Joel’s apartment assault him from all directions, like God speaking out of the sky. Voices in the dream become slow and garbled, or echo, like they’re coming from very far away. Locations turn into other locations without warning, other locations deconstruct before your eyes like a Lego set being taken apart. Sometimes the people in the dream interact with the dreamer, sometimes they play their part without knowing the dreamer is there. Sometimes the dreamer is aware he’s dreaming, and he tries to wake himself up.

Joel has hired the services of Lacuna, Inc., you see, the erase his memories of Clementine. They met years ago and just broke up. To forget the pain of losing her, he’s opted to forget her altogether, and so Lacuna gives him a prescription sleep aid and performs a procedure during the night in which Joel revisits all the times he spent with Clementine so Lacuna can expunge them from his mind. Everything about the procedure, from Joel’s point of view, is like a dream, and it’s flawlessly executed on film to make it the most authentic dream sequence ever conceived. But relationships — even ones that end — aren’t all bad memories, and as Joel returns to each one during the night, partly aware of the men outside his head in his apartment, he realizes what’s happening, and he wants to stop it. So he takes Clementine — the one in his memories — and races to other parts of his mind to keep her from being erased. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, all at once.

Heartbreaking, yes, but not bleak. The facts about Lacuna are exposed to former patients — including Joel and Clementine — by Mary (Kirsten Dunst), who works there. She sees the error of Lacuna’s ways and wants to set things right. Obviously Joel and Clementine, having no memory of the other or of Lacuna, are frightened and shocked and angry. Have they already done this? Have they been here before? If so, what’s the point of going forward? But Joel knows. “I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me,” Clementine says. And Joel says, “Okay.” “Okay.” Because he accepts things might not work out, but he knows how crucial it is to go through it anyway, to have her in his life. Love — taking a chance on it — is always worth it. Always.

Kate Winslet is absolutely superb in this as the sort of Rebel With Every Cause Clementine, “just a fucked up girl, trying to find her own piece of mind.” She says that same line twice, so you know it’s something she’s rehearsed about herself — it’s a badge of honor, as well as a warning label. She’s going to be difficult; she’s going to be challenging. Sometimes (often) on purpose. That’s who she is. (“I’m Ruth-less at the moment!”) The thing is, though, she’s not wrong. I mean, sometimes she is, but so is Joel. They’re both right sometimes, and they’re both wrong sometimes. Nobody’s perfect, nobody’s the bad guy. Just like any relationship, sometimes things go well and sometimes they don’t and it’s not anybody’s fault. That’s life, and it’s still worth it.

The message, the ideal, the special effects and the structure are all exquisitely executed. It’s a fantasy, obviously, but still entirely authentic. I mean, if there were such a  service as to have your memory erased, people would absolutely do it for profit, and other people would absolutely pay to have it done. The techs would no doubt rifle through your things and drink your booze and have sex on your chair. Some creepy guy would totally use someone’s forgotten memories to manipulate and prey on women. All of that, in that world, is entirely plausible — more than that, it’s probable. So the movie doesn’t just tell an interesting story, it poses a fascinating question. It makes you think about your own heart, your own memories, your own sorrows. Would you erase them?

I’ve been hurt a lot of times in my life — so has everybody — but who you love becomes a part of who you are. To erase them would be to erase a piece of yourself — to deny your existence. I would never want to do that.

“Meet me in Montauk.”

MY MOVIE SHELF: Deep Impact

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 296  Days to go: 283

Movie #81: Deep Impact

Back at the start of 1998 there was a lot of hubbub within insider entertainment news about two different “giant asteroid” movies being made (and set to release ) at the same time. Within two months of each other that summer, Deep Impact and Armageddon were released. Armageddon was by far the bigger movie — bigger stars, bigger budget, bigger hit, plus a theme song that railroaded just about everything in its path — but for me, Deep Impact has always been the better one.

Armageddon was always meant to be a flashy, wise-cracking dude movie with explosions, and that’s fine. Those are good, enjoyable popcorn flicks, and they don’t need a lot of substance to succeed. It’s a save-the-world movie, concerned only with those doing the saving. Deep Impact, on the other hand, is a movie about human frailty and heroism — it’s about the people on the ground faced with the hopes and fears of a global mission to divert an extinction-level event-sized asteroid, and the harsh realities that force them to face their own mortality and decide what’s important.

On the surface, one could probably pin Deep Impact‘s humanity on its director Mimi Leder (as opposed to Armageddon‘s testosterone-obsessed Michael Bay), a woman who throughout her career directing (largely) TV episodes has always shown interest in the personal stories associated with great drama. Even her other action thriller motion picture, The Peacemaker, had a villain with an emotional, personal purpose. What makes Deep Impact so exceptional, though, are the multiple stories it encompasses and the breadth of their emotions contained within.

Elijah Wood plays a young high school student named Leo Biederman who is thrust into the spotlight when the anomaly he spots during astronomy club turns out to be an asteroid larger than Mount Everest on a collision course with Earth. But he’s still just a kid, in love with his high school sweetheart Sarah (Leelee Sobieski), interested in sex and motorbikes, and close to his parents. In a quintessentially teenager way, he finds the notoriety kind of thrilling at first, and as the time to collision draws nearer, he fights to hold things together, and matures quite a bit, as he would have to.

Tea Leoni, meanwhile, is Jenny Lerner, an ambitious researcher at MSNBC who stumbles on the story of the asteroid when looking into the questionable resignation of a top government official. She bluffs her way through a confidential meeting with the President (Morgan Freeman) enough to find out the true story and get first question (a significant boost to her career) at the White House press briefing on the matter. Suddenly, she too is thrust into the spotlight, seen by the nation as the face of any news concerning the asteroid. It’s everything she’s wanted professionally, but personally she is suffering. Her father (Maximilian Schell) has left her mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and married a much younger woman — only two years older than Jenny herself. Any other time this state of affairs would be a tough hurdle, but faced with the possible end of all life on Earth, Jenny is at loose ends, unable to find any solid footing — particularly after the suicide of her mother. She shuns her father in anger, but gives up her ride to safety at the zero hour to a colleague she’s always admired (Laura Innes) who has a young daughter, and seeks out her father to reconcile with him. That’s where she needs to be, because her family is what’s most important to her.

The astronauts sent into space to destroy the asteroid are also featured, but as fully realized people with strengths and weaknesses instead of as wacky balls of machismo. These astronauts feature a woman, for one, played by Mary McCormack, who joins Blair Underwood, Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau, Aleksandr Baluev and Robert Duvall on a mission of arrogance, humility, loss, solidarity and ultimately sacrifice. Their mission, above all, is to save mankind if they can, regardless of the cost, and they fulfill it with heartbreaking and heroic resolve.

The movie also has small moments of lovely character work: Leo’s dad (Richard Schiff) giving him items to trade (and hence his blessing) when Leo decides to go back for Sarah. The President facing the nation with calm leadership, pragmatism, hope and eventually heartfelt compassion. The meticulous beauty regimen of Jenny’s mom and the devastating realization that she’s preparing to take her own life. The wrenching goodbyes between Sarah and her parents as they hand over her baby brother to care for and send her off with Leo to survive without them, then their touching embrace as they await their ends.

Deep Impact is great. It’s a movie filled with touching and thoughtful moments, of the wide array of feelings and fears that would be an absolute certainty in the face of such an impending event. It’s a movie that is concerned with the human condition, without sacrificing action and suspense. It explores the realistic, years-long process between discovery and destruction of such an asteroid, and how life continues to go on all that time, despite the looming possibility of the end of the world. It’s an emotional, touching, heartbreaking film. So I guess it’s no surprise that Deep Impact, unlike Armageddon, always leaves me in tears.