When a fissure in the comet expels a forceful plume of gas that pushes Jon Favreau up and back, so quickly that he flies off the ground and begins to float away. The audience is treated to a shot from inside his helmet of him screaming as the ground rushes away from him. The idea of just floating, with no control over your course or speed, unable to see what you are heading toward, watching solid ground fade into the distance, and just waiting to die, still terrifies.
President Beck's description of what is to come after the final attempt to deflect the comets fails straddles the line between this trope and Tear Jerker and effectively drives home the fear and horror of facing extinction.
President Beck: Our missiles have failed. The comets are still headed for Earth, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. So, this is it. If the world does go on, it will not go on for everyone. We have now been able to calculate the comet's final trajectories, and we have determined where they're going to strike. The smaller of the two comets, Biederman, will hit first, somewhere in the Atlantic Seaboard, probably off the waters of Cape Hatteras, in just under twelve hours, at 4:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time. The impact of the comet is going to be... well, disastrous. There will be a very large tidal wave moving quickly through the Atlantic Ocean. It'll be 100 feet high, travelling at 1,100 miles per hour. That's faster than the speed of sound. As the wave reaches shallow water, it's going to slow down, but the wave height, depending on the shelf off the coast will be anywhere from 1,000 to 3,500 feet high. Where the land is flat, the wave will wash inland, 600 to 700 miles. The wave will hit our nation's capital forty minutes after impact. New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, all will be destroyed. If you have any means of escaping the path of this wave, leave now. The impact of the larger comet will be nothing less than an extinction level event. It will strike land in Western Canada, three hours after Biederman. Within a week, the skies will be dark with dust from the impact and they will stay dark for two years. All plant life will dead within... four weeks. Animal life within... a few months. So, that's it. Good luck to us all.
Also the reaction of his senior staff when describing the impact of the larger asteroid is nothing short of simultainiously heartbreaking and nightmare inducing.
The smaller comet fragment crashing into the Earth and the huge megatsunamis (pictured) destroying everything has left more than a few paranoid about possible catastrophic meteorite impacts.
The sacrifices some people make, namely "take my baby and run". They're going to die and they don't even know if the baby will live.
