Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: [email-masked] (Jamahl Epsicokhan)
Date: 20 Aug 1998 01:16:05 GMT

This review contains some minor spoilers for the feature film
"Armageddon," but I promise not to give away any major revelations
concerning the plot.

Nutshell: Big, dumb, and expensive. Certainly not boring, but
certainly not unpredictable or memorable, either.

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Armageddon (USA, 1998)

PG-13, 150 minutes

Cast includes: Bruce Willis (Harry S. Stamper), Billy Bob Thornton
(Dan Truman), Liv Tyler (Grace Stamper), Ben Affleck (A.J. Frost),
Will Patton (Charles (Chick) Chapple), Peter Stormare (Lev Andropov),
Keith David (General Kimsey), Steve Buscemi (Rockhound)

Distributed by Touchstone Pictures
Screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams
Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Gale Ann Hurd, and Michael Bay
Directed by Michael Bay

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
Rating out of 4: **
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"Armageddon" is a technically skilled summer crowd-pleaser that's
about as deep tissue paper, with a brain that operates on the power of
a nine-volt battery. It's formulaic, predictable, and can't be taken
remotely seriously for more than about 10 seconds at a time. This is a
movie where you must walk in, instantly suspend all disbelief, see a
series of elaborate special-effects sequences on the screen, and never
once stop to think about any of it.

Then again, why on earth else would you want to see this movie? This
is what summer blockbusters are all about these days. If you go in
looking for anything deep or challenging, you're wasting your time.

What you'll get in "Armageddon" is all polish and no substance--a
story that will occupy your attention for 150 minutes and never really
bore you, but at the same time is something you can (and probably
will) forget about almost instantly afterward. It's effective
bubble-gum cinema--chewing gum for the mind. Considering we've already
covered the topic of cosmic collision once this year (see "Deep
Impact"), and that film was supposedly the more substantive episode of
angst, it seems only natural that this time when we go through the
cataclysmic exercise, we don't really stop to look at how people would
act with doomsday at hand. This is a nonstop action picture, plain and
simple.

"Armageddon" emerges from what I'm calling the Jerry Bruckheimer
school of cinema, an institute that brought us similar recent summer
escapism in the form of "Bad Boys," "The Rock," and "Con Air." Among
the alumni of this institution are directors Simon West ("Con Air"),
Tony Scott ("Top Gun," "Crimson Tide"), and of course Michael Bay
(this film, "Bad Boys," and "The Rock"). Bruckheimer's institute is
one that ensures no camera may be allowed to sit stationary (it must
always track or pan slowly), and that no shot be allowed to exist for
more than five or so seconds before there's a cut to another angle.
Oh, and the film must be wall-to-wall with music. (It's strange: The
above-mentioned Bruckheimer films used several different composers,
yet the score always sounds about the same.)

But never mind. "Armageddon" is in the tradition of large-scaled
summer disaster action. In this case, a meteor "the size of Texas" is
discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. With only 18 days
to stop it, NASA recruits expert oil driller Harry Stamper (Bruce
Willis) and his band of misfits to go up in space shuttles, drill a
hole deep into the asteroid, and detonate a nuclear bomb inside it to
shove it off course. Stamper wants things done right, and done his
way. He's the type of guy who, when he realizes his protege (Ben
Affleck) is sleeping with his daughter (Liv Tyler), he chases the guy
all through his oil rig with a loaded shotgun, and later confesses he
was just trying to scare him. (But of course!)

Once the movie gets into space, it's relentless in its visuals and
action sequences, but I can't say that I was particularly thrilled by
much of it. A steady diet of "extreme action" doesn't equate
excitement. It has to connect on some sort of emotional level. The
special effects merely grow tiring after awhile. Sure, they're more or
less convincing, but they're also so quickly edited together that
sometimes it just feels like random chaos on the screen. And there's
simply not enough invested in the story to make me believe that these
people were really saving the world, and not just going through the
motions of elaborate stunt coordination and digital artistry.

Besides, I've seen so many effects-laden movies lately that I just
don't find the eye candy all that tempting anymore. "Armageddon" plays
like a series of tasks: We have to promise our loved ones that we'll
succeed! We have to stop that asteroid before it hits us! We have to
get off this space station before it blows up! We have to cut the blue
wire before the bomb goes off! We have to crack our joke for this
scene to prove that we can be funny! Every scene is essentially the
same: Crisis, resolution, wry one-liner from Steve Buscemi. What's
lacking is cleverness, spontaneity, and interesting turns in the
action.

There are a couple of major snags for Our Heroes, but they're
derivative of snags we've seen over and over again in the movies.
(Name an action film where the heroes could actually trust the
government to do the right thing rather than being at the mercy of
bureaucratic officials who are persuaded by invisible advisers to take
what is so obviously the wrong action. Name an action film where a
countdown bomb isn't stopped with three seconds to spare. And so on.)

I think the main problem with the oversized disaster movies of recent
years is that they just make the stakes too laughably high.
"Independence Day," "Deep Impact," "Godzilla," and now
"Armageddon"--all are movies where the price of failure is the
destruction of the world and/or humanity itself. The outcome of what
lies in the story's background is always a foregone conclusion, yet
the characters still exist in a movie cliche world of discussing
trivial relationships and cracking one-liners when widespread dread
and despair should probably be winning out. "Armageddon" gets past
this problem by effectively ignoring it, keeping the end of the world
completely out of its mind except in the most superficial of ways. It
reduces "saving the world" to a goal which will earn its characters
hero status. Consider a scene where a large asteroid fragment hits
Paris, destroying half the city. Does anyone seem to care? Nope; it's
just an excuse for a "really cool special effect."

Can't we scale back just a little bit? Action and special effects are
certainly fun, but if the characters don't have to carry the
unfathomably ridiculous weight of saving the world upon their
shoulders, then won't there be a little more breathing room for the
standard examination of various relationships and personality quirks?

I tend to think so, because with the plot of "Armageddon" there's not
a twist or surprise to be found anywhere on the horizon. Everything
that happens follows the formula from A to B; every emotion is cued
with blatantly obvious manipulation; every bit of comic relief is
applied on cue; everything that happens can be anticipated five scenes
in advance.

Watching this movie, I felt like I was watching a large Hollywood
production trying so very hard to be huge, appealing, funny, and
entertaining. To a degree, it worked. Most of the performances are
right on target given their cardboard parameters, the suspense scenes
are sometimes taut and well-played (if hopelessly predictable), and
there are moments when the movie almost won me over before the formula
turned obvious and snapped me back into reality.

But never, for one moment, was the spell of sexy, shallow, visually
motivated cinema outweighed by the spell (or lack thereof) of
characters or story events. I could say I got caught up in isolated
pieces of the movie for brief moments at a time, but I can't say that
I was ever caught up in the flow of the narrative.

What this movie aspires to be is what you can find has been done 10
times better in "Apollo 13" (1995). When it comes down to it, both
films are about people in high-pressure situations trying to perform.
The difference is that "Apollo 13's" suspense was believable on human
terms, making it more exciting. "Armageddon" is just big and dumb.

Even so, if you just want overblown, overwrought, over-sensational
comic book summer entertainment that fully knows just how loony it is,
then "Armageddon" delivers. If you want characters that are even
remotely complex, or a plot that doesn't exist for the sole sake of
special effects sequences and cardboard manipulation, then please look
elsewhere.

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Copyright (c) 1998 by Jamahl Epsicokhan, all rights reserved.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this article is
prohibited.

Jammer's Movie Reviews - http://www.epsico.com/movies/
Jamahl Epsicokhan - [email-masked]