Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: Curtis Edmonds <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Jul 1998 04:44:35 GMT

by Curtis Edmonds -- [email-masked]

What Armageddon has going for it is The Tears.  "The Tears" is the
chapter in Tom Wolfe's novel The Right Stuff that describes John Glenn's
heroic Mercury orbital flight in 1961 and the stunning, overwhelming
reception that he received on his return.  "That was what the sight of
John Glenn did to Americans at that time," Wolfe writes.  "It primed
them for the tears.  And those tears ran like a river all over America."

The Mercury astronauts, Wolfe writes, were glorious Single-Combat
Warriors sent into space, armed only with their holy righteous stuff to
fight the good fight of the Cold War in space.  In Armageddon, the only
Russian menace is a leaky space station.  The astronauts of Armageddon
have "the wrong stuff":  they're a relentlessly eccentric rabble of oil
field roughnecks.  Instead of the rigorous training that the Mercury
Seven received, our nation's newest heroes are given a whirlwind
orientation through astronaut school, in what's meant to be a gentle
parody of the film version of Wolfe's novel.

But... they are on a Mission.  A holy Mission worthy of the True
Brotherhood itself!  Yes!  There is this asteroid or comet -- anyway,
this huge big rock -- that is going to smash poor Dayton and Buffalo and
Atlanta and the whole comprehensible world all to flinders.  And the
mission is to stop it, blow it apart so that the halves don't reach
earth... and to do that, you have to launch two next-generation shuttles
at the same time.. and refuel at the aforementioned space station... and
make a sharp hairpin around the moon...  and actually land on this
heaving, spinning hurtling rock, full of sharp pointy stalactites... and
somehow drill a hole through the iron crust of the rock...  and take off
again before a white-hot nuclear bomb blows the thing apart and... Yes!
Save the planet!  And the poor, grateful world watching on CNN while
eating their popcorn and Junior Mints... well, what can they do but
offer up The Tears at this glorious exhibition of the holy righteous
stuff?

The problem with Armageddon is this:  The sight of Bruce Willis and his
oil field Dream Team boarding the space shuttle, risking life and limb
on an uncertain outcome, should, in and of itself, be enough to bring on
The Tears.  Add in the image of the heart-breakingly beautiful Liv
Tyler, watching her father (Willis) and her fiancee (Ben Affleck) take
off in the heavens, and you've got emotional gold.  But for some reason
-- and it's the hallmark of the film -- it isn't enough.  You've got a
perfectly good story here, a perfectly heart-wrenching scene, and it
isn't enough for the moviemakers.  No, they've got to add in a lot of
quick edits of Kodak moments from around the world, they've got to try
to blatantly manipulate the audience to bring on The Tears, when the
moment was emotionally strong enough to begin with.

The motto of Armageddon is:  More is Better -- either that, or the old
MTV motto, Too Much Is Never Enough.  When deep-core driller Harry S.
Stamper (Willis) is authorized to bring his crew aboard the space
station, naturally, they're not waiting patiently for him back on the
oil rig.  No, the FBI has to chase them down with helicopters.  It's not
enough that the astronauts are in plenty of danger on the asteroid,
Armageddon has to engineer a showdown between the roughnecks and the
shuttle pilot (William Fichtner, looking for all the world like a young
Christopher Walken).  All through the movie, the director and
screenwriters suffer from a lack of faith in the quality of their story,
and try to embellish it needlessly.  You get the feeling that if
producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay were in charge of
Apollo 13, that they'd have Tom Hanks and his crew fighting off ravenous
space serpents on the way to the Moon.

The only person in Armageddon who is completely true to the sense of
Mission is Bruce Willis.  Although Willis is allowed to display some
charm and let loose some wisecracks in the early going, once he arrives
at the Johnson Space Center, his performance is all business.  For some
reason, Willis has been trying to put his old happy-go-lucky
performances in Moonlighting and Die Hard behind him lately, and that's
a shame.  Here, Willis is in "deep blue hero" mode the whole way through
-- stoic, confident, leadership.  He does a good job -- especially in
letting his emotional veneer crack at the very end -- but a lot of what
makes him a special actor is lost in Armageddon.

Billy Bob Thornton plays the leader of Mission Control, and it's very
refreshing to see him be given a normal part for once, after years of
playing Southern grotesques.  He has the same role here that Morgan
Freeman had in Deep Impact:  he is there to explain what's going on, and
he does a good enough job that it's fair to compare him to America's
Finest Actor.  Thornton makes up for a lot of the movie's charm deficit,
and so does Ben Affleck, who is Willis's primary foil.  Affleck, for
some reason, reminds me a lot of Adam Sandler -- he's got the same sort
of innate goofiness about him -- but he manages to be effective as both
the romantic lead and the action sidekick.  All Liv Tyler is given to do
is hang around Mission Control and look dewy-eyed, and this she
accomplishes tremendously.  Will Patton redeems himself for his part in
the debacle that was The Postman with a strong, sad-eyed performance,
and Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi from Fargo team up again to provide
much-needed comic relief.  (One wonders what the Coen Brothers would
have done with this budget and this storyline.)

But setting all of the above aside, the real question about Armageddon
is whether it delivers the goods as an action movie.  The answer to that
question is YES, in big Day-Glo orange letters.  Armageddon fulfills
your every desire for high-quality special effects and top-notch
action.  In every male reptile brain, there's a longing for thrills and
spills and things that go boom and major monuments getting wrecked, and
Armageddon specifically and joyfully caters to that basic hunger.
However, you've got to have more than that to make a great movie, and
Armageddon is so blatantly manipulative and action oriented that it's
hard to put it in that class.  But if you can't be great, you can at
least be entertaining, and Armageddon is mainstream Hollywood
entertainment at its finest.

Rating:  A-

--
Curtis Edmonds
[email-masked]

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