Hacker Cinema
Deep Impact
1998 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Mimi Leder
A seven-mile-wide space rock is hurtling toward Earth, threatening to obliterate the planet. Now, it's up to the president of the United States to save the world. He appoints a tough-as-nails veteran astronaut to lead a joint American-Russian crew into space to destroy the comet before impact. Meanwhile, an enterprising reporter uses her smarts to uncover the scoop of the century.
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31 comments on Hacker News
I love disaster movies and they ocassionally lean into the idea of traffic being kind of bad in the event of a disaster. Deep Impact had a protagonist escaping biblical level tsunamis on a dirt bike.
If we are talking underrated films he was in, my choice would be Deep Impact.
Don’t forget Deep Impact, sort of a summer companion blockbuster, but which “astronomers said was more accurate”, could feed your Hobbit obsessions, and NASA went on to name a space probe after it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (best of the grandiose classics imo)
Deep Impact (the only good asteroid movie?)
Jurassic Park + Independence Day (peak Goldblum)
Total Recall + A Scanner Darkly (best Philip K Dick adaptation)
Gravity (great visuals / perseverance story)
I know. Back in the day there were two movies* out at the same time about an asteroid hitting the earth and suddenly there were lots of asteroid hitting the earth stories in the media.
* Deep Impact and Armageddon *
* (studios did this to piggy back on the marketing expenses)
If the asteroid is far enough away, blowing it apart, even partially, would change all trajectories to almost certainly miss the absurdly tiny target that is the earth from a distance of tens or hundreds of millions of miles away.
On the other hand, if it happened close enough to Earth that all the little pieces, even if very tiny individually, still fall into the atmosphere, their evaporation friction would roast our world's surface for minutes to hours, terribly, causing global extinctions despite there never having been a single major impact at all.
The movie Deep Impact badly fucks that last scenario up near its end when humanity is saved by the main asteroid being completely blown apart just hours away from impact with the Earth. In reality, there'd have been no literal deep impact, but the'yd have all died anyhow, literally baked to death along with every other flammable thing on the earth's surface.
It certainly couldn't be any worse or more idiotic than the scripts for probably every Hollywood natural disaster movie: The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc.
I was only 12 when Shoemaker-Levy banged into Jupiter in 1994, so wiser minds or those with better memories may correct me.
At the time, the leading theory for what killed the dinosaurs was still quite terrestrial - volcanos and climate change.
There was increasing evidence for the meteorite impact theory, but a big block was “Space is big, outside the early formation of the Solar System comets and asteroids don’t just slam into planets”.
Then comet Shoemaker-Levy showed us that they actually do, perhaps still quite frequently, with Jupiter playing an imperfect shield for Earth. It was one of the last roadblocks to the now-widely accepted impact theory (still not ‘solved’ of course, and perhaps only part of the extinction puzzle).
Dinosaurs were back in the zeitgeist thanks to Jurassic Park (1993), but Shoemaker-Levy and the impact theory gave us the 1998 twin movies Armageddon and (the better of the two, imho) Deep Impact.
The ruling stated that the Constitutional justification for copyright (and other IP) laws was to incentivize creators. AI does not need incentives, and thus AI-generated content cannot qualify for copyright. Under this line of reasoning, neither can patents (though note that trademarks derive value from the resources and effort spent promoting them, not from their creation, so trademarks are unaffected).
The act of prompting and customizing iteratively especially in systems which allow the user to submit a prompt ...are clearly creative works that USE an AI not uncopyrightable.
If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot do so on the basis of a case that literally never addressed that issue unless you would like to traverse the muddy ground between actuality and fiction.
The case literally deals with the output of the AI model, not the input. But on that note...under existing law, code can be copyrighted but not its output. Thus, it is logical to reason that prompts to an AI model can also be copyrighted to the extent they are not strictly functional.
But with AI models and content generally, nobody cares about the prompts/inputs. The output is what matters. (For comparison: Deep Impact and Armaggedon were both the results of the same input: disaster movie in which a team of astronaughts has to go to the asteroid to blow it up before it destroys Earth. The "models" were different screenwriters and directors. Compare the outputs: one is a blockbuster classic, and most people don't remember the other movie.)
A 420p copy of the movie is very different from a 4k version. Similarly an encryption copy of the file will intentionally not resemble the original in any way. Both of those distinctions would likely be ignored by a court.
Similar, a movie that copies the plot points will likely be fine, but a song that copies the notes of a song will not be. Very different cover version will sometimes be found as a derived work, even when they are as different as Deep Impact is to Armageddon.
The movie re-encoded into a different format is perfectly fine if the work is sufficiently different.
Taking a file of wolf of Wall Street and encoding it so all the oranges are blue but there’s no other changes is bad as that’s clearly a derived work.
Taking the same file and scrambling it so it doesn’t resemble is perfectly fine.
Watching the movie and then making your own version of the same exact plot points is infringement. But using plot points that are changed is perfectly fine.
There’s existing copyright law that prevents the makers of the movie Deep Impact from suing the makers of Armageddon.
>Is there a global-scale natural disaster movie that is any good?
Deep Impact is not a great film, but does a surprisingly good job of telling its story in a moving way.
Its archrival Armageddon is also not a great film, but is arguably even more effective at its job (that being "fun summer popcorn thriller").
Trash disaster movies have their place, 2012, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Moonfall, etc. They are all entertaining in their own right, and are usually very self-aware of how stupid they are. Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold. Though, I think that film was a higher tier than most of the list here, the Aerosmith song made for that film dominated the summer radio that year and the soundtrack flew off the shelves. I wish things like that still happened, you'll get a bump on Spotify but its cultural impact is much less.
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
Or Armageddon and Deep Impact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(film)
> Deep Impact was released in the same summer as a similarly themed film, Armageddon, which fared better at the box office, while astronomers described Deep Impact as being more scientifically accurate.
https://archive.ph/stLB5 (I encountered a paywall after accidentally closing the tab)
The $330m figure is mentioned in the title and at the top of the article but nowhere else. I'm not sure what purpose it serves except for attracting clicks and trying to provoke a visceral "wow that's a waste of money" response. (I'm sure we'd allot unlimited funds if there actually was an asteroid.)
Regardless, it's an interesting experiment and it will be nice to see results next month (how soon after the September 27 collision will analysis be possible?).
> The best known collision occurred 66 million years ago when a 10 km wide asteroid struck Chicxulub in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The collision created a blast that had the energy of several billion atomic bombs and led to the destruction of 75% of all plant and animals species, including all land-based dinosaurs.
> Since then, films such as Don’t Look Up, Armageddon and Deep Impact have depicted similar devastation being triggered by asteroid or comet crashes in modern times.
Unrelated, I found the above use of "since then" really funny, because it's comparing movies from the past twenty-five years to sixty-six million years ago.
I think I'd disagree with the assertion about Elijah Wood, Deep Impact was a pretty big film and he had a key role in that. He also had many other roles before that in some pretty notable films, especially The Faculty and heck, he was playing alongside Kevin Costner in 1994!
Perhaps I am just old, and a keen film watcher, but I wouldn't describe him as a lesser known actor at that point in his career.
Also, Sean Bean has long been a well known supporting actor. Anna Karenina, Goldeneye, Patriot Games, etc. But I would concede that he's very much more well known in the UK because of his TV roles, especially Sharpe which ran for 7 series. Again, not a lesser known actor if you're playing the bad guy in a Bond film.
'Chapman describes a “giggle factor” and a “Chicken Little” dynamic. That was ultimately changed by a mix of scientific progress, policy outreach, writing for the general public, and the major Hollywood films Armageddon and Deep Impact'
-Good to hear that Armageddon may actually have done something good then..
> “I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world.”
From the plot of the 1998 movie, Deep Impact: "MSNBC journalist Jenny Lerner investigates the sudden resignation of Secretary of the Treasury Alan Rittenhouse and his connection to "Ellie", supposedly a mistress. [...] she finds out that Ellie is really an acronym: "E.L.E." ("extinction-level event"). "
The same chance of getting two movies with the same premise (Armageddon and Deep Impact, White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen)
I am not sure about that one. Maybe it was the movie Deep Impact?
But I will tell you an actual and more direct example. The recently elected president of Ukraine LITERALLY is a comedian who was the star of a show where he plays the President of Ukraine! He had very little in the way of policies, but a lot of sharp humor, criticism of Poroshenko and the fact that many people routinely could see him on TV being the “President”!
In the movie Dr. Strangelove the president was very upset by the idea of choosing who lives and who dies, which is when Dr. Strangelove brightly exlaims "that could easily be done by a computer".
Decades later, Deep Impact doesn't bother with the qualms, and just has the president solemnly proclaim on TV that a computer will randomly select people, on top of a fixed pool of "VIP", and the people watching TV are all just... sad, and hope they get picked. Not one person goes "What? What did he just say?".
This "meme", that a catastrophy destroys all but a selection, is as old as the Bible, i.e. of Noah as well as the Book of Revelations. Flood myths in general are fascinating, some even have "the bad guys" surviving the flood they themselves caused.
edit: I tried to find the "bad guys surviving the flood" one, I'm 99% sure it was on here http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html
But I couldn't easily find it again, it's such a giant page. I think it involved lying to the gods about who caused the flood (or other issue), who then punish the wrong guys, while the actually guilty people survive. Could have been about two island peoples, one good one bad, but I'm not sure, it's been quite a while since I read that page.
Remember how the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact both came out in the same year? (Apparently it was 1998.) It was so weird to have a choice of two bad asteroid movies, which wasn’t exactly a common trope at the time.
I got a similar feeling when a company advertised in my Facebook feed that it had “reinvented belts,” and then a different company advertised more or less the same thing a few weeks later! Same with pills designed to boost your brain power. One week you are being pitched by brand X, the next by brand Y, and each one gives the impression that someone passionate about belts, or neuroscience, or whatever, poured their blood, sweat, and tears into this revolutionary new product.
Edit: I actually bought a “reinvented” belt, and I love it. I wonder if modern marketing, i.e. Facebook, makes it possible to “reinvent” mundane objects and make a buck, maybe the way it used to be before products became more commoditized and distributed by big corporations.
And Deep Impact http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/
Good bases for next years Deep Impact/Armageddon movie head-to-head.
By near identical do you mean, say, Armageddon and Deep Impact? Because there's a world of difference between two movies having the same high concept and actually being near identical. Parallel development of premises is bound to happen, particularly with ones as obvious as catastrophic events and casual sex.
It's not even that there are ethical reasons people in Hollywood don't steal scripts. The reasons are practical: if your script is good, it's going to cost me a lot less to pay you for it than it would cost to pay some other more established writer's quote to develop a new script from the same premise.
I think any entrepreneur owes it to him- or herself to consider what "competition" actually means. You shouldn't assume it's a zero-sum game, and only one company can exist. If you look closely enough, you'll also see that competitors don't mirror each other as much as you would think, and they leverage their differences to their advantage.
Launching at the same time as a competitor creates more static in the press. I remember when the movie "Deep Impact" was announced close to "Armageddon". I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, this is too much". I don't think that whichever was the last one to hit the big screen was riding the coat tails of the other, or that the earliest one deserved my attention or money more than the last one.
Should Pepsi have called it quits, because they knew that Coca Cola were doing a coca beverage? Of course not. A competitor can be a pain in the ass in some ways, but it also makes for a great way to analyze your market and customers without looking inwards, which can be very difficult for anyone. If they gain traction, you'll know that there's a market.
If they die, you'll have their example as a cautionary tale; if you don't have a lighthouse to navigate by, navigate around the ship wrecks ahead of you.
I think he's annoyed that Convore launched a similar project and received some good press and community love (as little as it is outside the distortion field of the Valleysphere of Techcrunch and HN).
I always think of ReadWriteStart's mantra that "the early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese".
"Is it important to be the first one out with the 'same' idea" is one of the many inane theory-crafting discussions that serve little other purpose than discourage people from launching.
"so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on."
Or, they sit on similarly produced movies for years until such moment as it is economically "sensible" for them to release it. The entertainment industry has done that with dead people (Bernie Mac, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, etc.) for a long time. If they see advanced hype from one movie (in the case of Armageddon), they'll release their not-as-good one (Deep Impact, IMO) as an early-bird special to get people in the theater thinking "hey, it's just as good, whatever".
Now, there are companies (like the Asylum) that make films _directly_ knocking off upcoming movies. They shoot and produce them in months and push it straight-to-disc for the rental/retail market. That's a different thing altogether.
Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots:
Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998)
The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006)
Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009)
These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on.
In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".
I wholly disagree for video games, but then I worked as a reviewer so I admit my view is likely very skewed from the average consumer. Near identical games come out sometimes months apart in video games, but similar happens in the film industry with Armageddon appearing 2 months after Deep Impact in cinemas in '98.
The new Harry Potter was held off last year because the produces were afraid two competing fantasy series could kill each other near a Christmas recession. Twilight, which is basically swept up in the box office and with Harry Potter 6 due out literally like a week later and cost almost 7 times as much to make.
However cooincidences occur frequently with movies and games due to waiting for the right market attention. I mean a G.I. Joe movie or Transformers movie could have been made whenever, similar with a lot of movies, however it's been impossible up until late to make live action movies with quality animation.
I personally see little difference between a lot of video games and movies. I'm uninterested in 2012, because I already saw it with Knowing and its about as meaningful as a movie on the millennium bug would have been in 1997. Then there's the whole Bedtime Stories following Inkheart (Which was due out in March 2008, but was pulled back to December 12 at least in the UK), and Bedtime Stories looked like it was rushed into production following the sale of Inkhearts rights.
Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask as I had a movie pass at like 13 (the pass cost $20 a month, I easily got $40 worth of movies per weekend). So I'll say there is a need for hype in the movie and video game industry, however I still believe there's a big opportunity for companies to rush poor quality movies into production to steal the limelight from another. This is especially true when some movies can take 3 years to produce and others are done and finished in 9 months and may wait another 6 months for release, but if you group movies too closely you end up with two distinct groups of movies (like plays) Comedy or Tragedy and then all grouping is meaningless.
Hit movies come in pairs because the big studios try to leverage each others marketing budgets. You really think that nobody thought of an asteroid movie until Armageddon/Deep Impact?