Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: "Mikel J. Koven" <[email-masked]>
Date: 11 Jul 1998 04:53:09 GMT

Review by Mikel J. Koven
The following review was published in The Express, St. John's
Newfoundland, 8 July, 1998.
Copyright 1998, by the author.

Armageddon (1998)

     Armageddon may very well be the biggest movie scheduled to open
this summer.  Touchstone Studios (i.e. Disney) have obviously banked a
lot of money on this flick, and perhaps I am just getting cynical after
The X-Files debacle, but it strikes me that we as movie audiences are
becoming more and more susceptible to studio marketing hype than ever
before.  No matter how bad Armageddon is, and it is pretty awful, thrill
seekers are going to line up for miles and days in order to watch the
destruction.
     Here is the plot of Armageddon: a big meteor is headed for earth.
This rock, referred to by the scientists in the flick as "a global
killer" will destroy every living thing on earth unless it is
destroyed.  The only hope for humanity is to land a crew of American
(naturally) deep-core drillers on the asteroid and blow it up with
nuclear weapons.
     Bruce Willis plays Harry S. Stamper, a rogue deep-core driller, who
is the best in his trade.  He is brought on by NASA to advise a team of
astronauts taking care of this mission.  Obviously, Stamper cannot trust
a bunch of strangers, and he assembles his own motley crew of
meteor-killers.  The boys blast off, blow-up the rock, and return as
heroes.
     What I think is most noxious about this movie is the absolutely
shameless flag waving: if you were bothered by the "rah, rah!  USA,
A-OK!" sentiments of Independence Day, you can certainly miss this
movie.  Every dramatic moment in the film has the "stars and stripes" in
the back ground.
     What starts as an "interesting"piece of Americana quickly becomes
jingoistic and annoying: Armageddon reifies the old frontier as its
theme.  NASA and the White House have all these scientists and advisors
who are helpless against the end of the world.  They run around like
Chicken-Little wondering how many "nukes" it will take to destroy the
meteor.  In walks the old "working class hero", Willis, who points out
that it takes a "real" man, and not some Pentagon desk jockey, to do
this job.  It is only the same gumption that built America, that can
save it - oh, yes, and the world too I guess.
     We see "foreigners", people of color, wearing "funny" clothes doing
their ethnic things in their far-off and dirty countries praying
superstitiously to their "gods" for salvation - completely unaware that
the good old US of A will save the day.  Even in the States, we see
Norman Rockwell-like tableaus of middle-America, workin' folk gazing
longingly at the Stars and Stripes looking for salvation.  It is
pathetic really - and makes one crave the subtleties of ID4.
     Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the man who produced The Rock a few
years ago, as the television ads like to constantly point out, fails
Armageddon in the same way he failed with last year's Con-Air; it is not
sufficient to add more explosions, more action, more "zippy one-liners",
if you haven't got a decent script.
     Director Michael Bay (who also directed The Rock), is likewise
positioned to take responsibility for this turkey - he helmed one hit,
and it feels like Bruckheimer automatically assumes that the same
director will rework the same magic.  The problem is that in The Rock,
there was a crackling good script.  The characters were developed, and
the situation was, at least, plausible.  The humor came from the
situation, and did not, like in both Con-Air and Armageddon, get slotted
in as "one-liners".
     At the centre of The Rock was the awkward relationship between Sean
Connery and Nicolas Cage; in Armageddon we have "the awkward
relationship" between Willis' Stamper and Ben Affleck's A. J. Frost, who
is in love with Stamper daughter, Grace, played by Liv Tyler.  With the
Connery - Cage relationship, the two men got to know one another over
the course of the film; but in Armageddon, the relationship between
Willis and Affleck has been on-going for five years - none of which we
see or gets developed in the paint-by-numbers screenplay.  The result is
we don't care: Willis is being a weenie, Affleck is being a "sook". And
Liv Tyler is there just to look beautiful, framed against "Old Glory".
     The cast is alright with what they have to work with.  Chisel-faced
Willis is out to save the world and seems focused on not bursting out
laughing at the absurdity of this movie.  And Affleck is solid enough in
his first real-big movie, after his success in Good Will Hunting.  If
Hollywood needed verification that Affleck is an up-and-coming star,
this movie will probably do that.
     The real waste here is Billy Bob Thornton as NASA supervisor, Dan
Truman; Thornton commands the screen in a way that only a few other
actors can (George Clooney, I think also has this charisma).  Perhaps it
is his Southern drawl, but Thornton can make even the most sentimental
and ridiculous dialogue at least plausible.
     It is worth noting that, as is the standard in Western literature,
the two main protagonists on opposite ends of the central crisis, Willis
in space and Thornton in Houston, are frequently two sides of the same
psyche.  In Armageddon, should you fuse the names of Willis' Harry S.
Stamper with Thornton's Dan Truman, you get Harry S. Truman, the
cold-war president of the Untied States who ordered the bomb dropped on
Japan, another "Armageddon".
     But touches like that, or the brief joke at the beginning of the
movie attacking Godzilla(it's pretty hard to miss), are not sufficient
to save the film.  Neither are the special effects, which range from the
spectacular to the pretty lame.
     In part, I guess one can forgive the bravado of the film's
marketing team: with Dreamworks' Deep Impact beating Armageddon to
theatres by a couple of months, Touchstone needed to save some face.
But unlike last year's Dante's Peak and Volcano, two films which stood
on their own and whose only similarity was the presence of magma, Deep
Impact and Armageddon are virtually the same movie - except that the
former was good.  Sure enough, as I predicted, many people were
disappointed with Deep Impact in that it was character driven with few
scenes of mass destruction (which if you rent out some older movies, you
will discover is more in keeping with the disaster movie genre of the
1970s than the action extravaganzas we see today).  If all you want is
to see stuff blow up and get crushed, then Armageddon may be for you.
     But, as a movie, Armageddon bites.  The script is paint-by-numbers,
the characters are undeveloped, and the racism, sexism, and jingoism
which passes for patriotic heroism in the United States is frankly
offensive.  I cannot believe, or don't want to believe, that even our
cousins from south of the border would like this movie.  But I've been
wrong before.

Rating: *