Two teenage astronomy club members, Leo Biederman (Wood) and Sarah Hotchner (Sobieski) , alert astronomer Dr. Marcus Wolf (Charles Martin Smith) to their sighting of an unusual comet. After Wolf realizes the comet will hit Earth he attempts to alert his colleagues, but he dies in a car accident after leaving the observatory. One year later, a reporter for MSNBC in Washington, DC, Jenny Lerner (Leoni), discovers that the government was hiding its knowledge about the comet, which the government had classified as an "E.L.E", an acronym for an extinction-level event.