Deep Impact: Difference between revisions

----

{{tropelist}}

* [[Altar the Speed]]

* [[Apathetic Citizens]]: The ''throngs'' (far too many to simply be [[Face Death with Dignity|facing death with dignity]]) in New York City still going about their business downtown even though the President has warned everyone to get away from the Eastern seaboard.

* [[Disaster Movie]]

* [[Driven to Suicide]]: Implied with Jenny's mother.

* [[Dull Surprise]]: Andrea, as they fly up to the comet. "Look at them [the rocks barely missing the spacecraft], they're the size of houses.", yeah, and you sound really concerned.

* [[Earth-Shattering Poster]]

* [[Elaborate Underground Base]]: Created to put a million people underground for 2 years.

* [[Every Car Is a Pinto]]: The astronomer's ride couldn't just get hit by a truck, nooooo...

* [[Face Death with Dignity]]: "Look on the bright side. We'll all have high schools named after us."

* [[Failed a Spot Check]]: When the tsunami hits Manhattan, we see a man in a park reading a newspaper who doesn't notice the massive wave destroying the city until it swamps him. Doubly hilarious because everyone knew the asteroid was supposed to hit on that day, so even assuming someone ''did'' print a newspaper that morning, there would be nothing else worth reporting.

** Considering he looks over 70 and wouldn't be eligible for the Ark as a result, it looks more like another instance of [[Face Death with Dignity]].

* [[Fatal Family Photo]]

* [[Government Conspiracy]]: Played more realistically than most, they can only keep it secret for about a year. But still Constructing a massive Underground base requiring thousands of people and a new spacecraft. Surely someone would have blabbed sooner.

** You cannot determine the course and speed of a comet from one picture.

*** It is possible, sort of. [[wikipedia:Blue shift|Blue-]] and [[wikipedia:Redshift|Redshifting]] occurs where the light from an interstellar object shifts slightly towards the blue end of the visible spectrum (implying that it is moving towards the observer, and therefore Earth) VS towards the red end of the visible spectrum (implying that the object is moving ''away from'' the observer, and therefore Earth), respectively. However, neither one is mentioned in the movie.

** The blast from the first nukes cause damage to the ship when it's several miles away, meaning those are not low yield bombs, but somehow all that energy at ''ground zero'' of the blast just cause a clean separation of the comet into two. Then ICMBs launched at the comets later on fail to divert them, even though those missiles are powerful enough to level cities, which neither comet is bigger than. The comets aren't even solid rock. They're made of bits of rock in a bunch of gas and ice, the latter of which would be vaporized by the heat of a nuke. Of course this is for the sake of the story, but worthy of praise of scientific accuracy?

*** Consider that a city is gone when all its buildings are destroyed, not when there is a crate 500 feet deep and a few miles wide, which is something a nuke can't even come close to producing.

** Impact-induced waves don't travel like tsunamis do-they're a different type of wave, and they tend to peter out before they go more than a few dozen miles, a few hundred tops. Plus, waves have a hard time traveling very far inland because they're fighting gravity and friction with the ground along the way. This means that while Biederman would have doomed large swaths of Virgina, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Delaware, the rest of the country and the world would have been fine.

*** The wave itself has a serious case of [[Hollywood Density]]. Water is heavy-a cubic meter weighs a metric ton, which is 2,205 lbs. At the bottom of the 3500-foot wave, the pressure would be 1,520 pounds per square inch. Every single skyscraper in Manhattan would have torn off its foundations and broken up into very, ''very'' small pieces.

* [[In Space Everyone Can See Your Face]]: Averted. As the astronauts worked on the dark side of the comet their face shields were open, only closing them as the Sun approached the horizon. This scene also realistically portrays the effects of failing to use face shields {{spoiler|when one astronaut fails to close their shield in time. The exposure of only a few seconds results in immediate permanent blindness and severe sun burn}}.

* [[Made of Explodium]]: The [[Every Car Is a Pinto|astronomer's jeep]], which is run off the road by a semi and explodes in midair.

** Not to mention that his phone somehow broke at a convenient moment, leading him to take a high-speed chase to deliver the information; since of course seconds counted in stopping the comet-- and yet the crash delayed the discovery by over two months.

* [[Mood Motif]]: Cue the tense strings...

* [[The Mountains of Illinois]]: Well, at least it was the same ''state''...

** The hill Leo proposes to Sarah on is rather obviously in Southern California.

* [[Outrun the Fireball]]: Or tsunami in this case.

** The force of the waves smacking off of the hills in the background should have shook the ground and made it difficult to run.

* [[Soft Water]]: A wave that tall would have scoured the entire East Coast to the bedrock.

* [[Someone Has to Die]]: The crew of the ''[[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic|Messiah]]'' sacrifice themselves so that everyone on Earth can survive.

** Surprisingly, no mention was made of the fact that, since their spacecraft uses an [[Orion Drive]], its fuel supply '''is''' nuclear bombs.

* [[Taking You with Me]]: Done to the comet.

* [[While Rome Burns]]

* [[Your Days Are Numbered]]: As soon as the Wolf-Biederman comet is revealed to the public, the world is told the projected timeline for the impact. First, the countdown to the Messiah mission begins, then to the actual catastrophe.

[[Category:Films of the 1990s]]

[[Category:Deep Impact]]