The Summer of '98 was the summer box office showdown between two asteroid disaster movies and a giant lizard. The asteroids won out with someone called Mary sweeping the box office honours for the year. Deep Impact arrived a couple of months ahead of Disney's monstrous Armageddon and approached a similar theme in a quite different way. This was the soft centred, humane, bitter sweet approach that smacked of the good sentiment that most things associated with Steven Spielberg tend to suffer from.

The movie is largely saved from total idiocy and gushing melodrama by yet another magnificent performance by Morgan Freeman as the President. His influence on lending proceedings some shred of credibility cannot be doubted. He towers above what is essentially a rather mushy disaster movie that has tried to cut costs by saving the grand special effects for the last few moments of the movie and concentrate on the "emotional" aspect of events as doomsday looms in front of what seems like largely middle class America.

You can either switch off and get carried away by the hammy sentimentality of Vanessa Redgrave's performance for instance or the numerous scenes where loved ones have to part from one another, perhaps for the last time. The film bears an unmistakable "woman's touch" and is warm hearted and somewhat over sentimental and gooey. The director is indeed Mimi Leder who earned herself quite a reputation directing the super successful E.R.. There are several scenes designed to create that lump in the throat kind of feeling. Its all very efficient but drips with mush. The special effects CGI scene that we have to wade through the sentiment for arrives at the very end of the show and is admittedly fairly impressive even though very CGI. It's an impressive and spectacular scene however as the giant tidal wave hits New York, forever target number one in all disaster movies. Its polished, reasonably entertaining mushy fodder with top notch production values and decent acting even if the wonderfully named Sturgeon "Fish" Tanner is a little over the top. We found Armageddon more enjoyable in a brain dead sort of way, though this was clearly less awful a film than that terrible turkey. Both movies made pots of money and 1998 will forever be remembered as a particularly unmemorable year for quality cinema..