

ARMAGEDDON (1998)
 
Rating: 2.0 stars (out of 4.0)
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Key to rating system:
2.0 stars - Debatable
2.5 stars - Some people may like it
3.0 stars - I liked it
3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie
4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out
*********************************

Directed by: 
Michael Bay

Screenplay:
Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams

Starring: 
Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Peter
Stormare, Steve Buscemi, Seiko Matsuda

Ingredients: 
Large asteroid, crew of misfit oil drillers who become astronauts,
countdown timer with big green lights

Synopsis: 
In the beginning of ARMAGEDDON the voice of Charlton Heston explains
that long ago in the Cretaceous Period, a 6-mile chunk of asteroid
exterminated the world of the dinosaurs. When the rock struck, its
instant vaporization threw so much dust and gas into the atmosphere that
the sun was blocked long enough to kill off most plants and animals. In
ARMAGEDDON a new rock - - this time 'the size of Texas' - - is poised to
collide with the Earth. American heroes must save the world from certain
disaster while the helpless international community follows the American
heroes' exploits with awe and adoration.

Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and his hell-raising crew of eccentric oil
drillers are considered the best drillers in the world. Dan Truman
(Billy Bob Thornton) as head of NASA recruits Stamper and the oilers for
a mission to save humanity from extinction. NASA divides the oilers into
two mission teams: one led by Stamper and the other led by Stamper's
daughter's boyfriend AJ (Ben Affleck), a rival who doesn't get along
with Stamper. Each team gets a mobile drilling rig, a space shuttle, and
a nuclear bomb. Using Earthbound shuttles as space rockets, each team
must slingshot around the moon, reach the giant asteroid, and drill 800
feet into it the asteroid in order to plant and explode a nuclear device
- - so that hopefully the asteroid will be split into pieces and avoid
colliding with Earth. Only one nuclear device is needed for success but
the two rival teams are sent simultaneously to preclude failure.

On the mission, Stamper and the boys face perils such as the asteroid's
selective gravity. Two-ton space vehicles containing crew members are in
danger of floating off into free space. At the same time, two-ton rocks
might crush the men as the boulders fall with resounding thuds on the
airless asteroid's surface. Also, somebody has thoughtlessly equipped
the mobile drilling rigs with Gatling machine guns. 

Liv Tyler plays Stamper's daughter (and AJ's girlfriend) Grace, a pretty
face who waits helplessly on Earth. There are also bits involving
stereotyped minorities such as the chatterbox African American who
shrieks in surprise, the overweight Samoan hit by a meteor, and the
Asian couple who applaud Stamper when their faces get splattered with
black oil. Japanese superstar entertainer Seiko Matsuda gets all of two
seconds as an oblivious tourist who declares that she wants to go
shopping during a meteor shower.

Can Stamper and the oil drilling guys save humanity from certain
destruction?

Opinion:
Speaking of doom, a New Age friend told me her theory about why DEEP
IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON came out this summer. She says a 16th century
doom-and-gloom prophet named Nostradamus wrote that a terror would fall
from the sky next year "in the seventh month of 1999." Which could mean
anything from a slingshot crash of NASA's plutonium-laden Cassini Probe
to a terrorist on a parachute, if you believe in that sort of thing. But
in Hollywood, it amounts to little more than coffee shop inspiration for
summer asteroid movies such as DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON.

Getting back to ARMAGEDDON, it seems like there's a scene missing. In
the movie, as time runs short, the crew led by AJ has a perfect
opportunity to wake up, unpack their gear, start digging, plant their
nuclear bomb, and save the Earth (and its 6 billion people). Instead,
they go driving around the asteroid with the mobile drilling rig - -
inexplicably wasting precious time sightseeing when the Earth (including
AJ's girlfriend) is in immediate and dire jeopardy. Is AJ's nuke
completely forgotten as a viable option in his mission? 

At its heart ARMAGEDDON is mostly a rehash of stuff we've already seen
before in other uninspiring movies. But at least the mediocre doomsday
script is spiced up with implausible events (such as Gatling guns) to
increase the number of booms and bangs. 

The cinematography in ARMAGEDDON is noteworthy in that for two hours and
30 minutes the audience is hit with a dizzying mishmash of photographic
angles nearly every second. Meanwhile, in the background music,
suspenseful drumming goes on and on and on. All this changing scenery
and ominous drumming is illusory fluff - - an obvious attempt to make it
seem like something interesting is always about to happen. But the
continuous images hold interest for only about an hour, then diminish in
impact as nothing substantial really happens. On the other hand, being
distracted from ARMAGEDDON's implausible plot while waiting for the
ending to roll around might not be a bad thing. 

In short, ARMAGEDDON consists of a few booms, a few bangs, lots of
distracting images, and a period of waiting around for a possibly happy
ending.
 
Reviewed July 1, 1998

Trivia (Sci Fi fans only): 
After the movie I wondered whether in reality we Americans would be able
to use nukes to fend off a space rock the size of Texas (i.e. over a
quarter million square miles), and found out that astronomers have
actually done simulations. In the computer simulations using the rough
equivalent of an atom bomb planted in an asteroid only a mile in size,
the asteroid cracked up, but the pieces stayed on course to wipe out the
Earth. 

One thing that’s always bugged me about sci fi movies is the use of
rockets, which somehow seem kind of low tech, since rockets waste vast
amounts of fuel and then run out. But in order to travel such vast
distances, interstellar travel would require establishing a propulsion
force that, unlike rocketry, doesn’t use up much fuel.

For example, when you drop a penny, it experiences a force which pulls
it in the direction of earth. This is because the penny is within a
gravitational field which propels the penny towards Earth, without
having to burn fuel. If the gravitational field pointed sideways, the
penny would fall sideways. If the field pointed up, the penny would fall
up. The penny always falls in the direction of the field, without having
to burn fuel. Field is the key.

Field effect propulsion is perfect for sci fi space travel. Basically,
in order to create a propulsive force to drive a spaceship in any
direction without the use of fuel, all you have to do is establish a
ship with its own field. Point the field in the direction you want to
go, and you continue to "fall" in that direction forever. Point it in a
different direction, and there you go. 

Has the principle of field effect propulsion been demonstrated before in
real life? Certainly. It's known as the Biefeld Brown effect, a weak
phenomenon first observed by physicist/astronomer Dr. Paul Alfred
Biefeld as early as 1923. Biefeld created a strong electrostatic field
in a simple capacitor (a capacitor is a sandwich made of two metal
plates and gook in between) - - and the capacitor always levitated
weakly towards the direction stipulated by its generated field. That was
over seventy five years ago, in 1923, before big budgets and modern
materials. Just imagine the kind of field effect propulsion we could
achieve in a 1998 science fiction movie (or in real life using the
movie’s budget).

Most recently, in 1992 Dr Eugene Podkletnov of Tampere University,
Finland published a paper describing research in which he using a
special ceramic disk to produce a field in the direction opposing
gravity. When non-metal and non-magnetic materials were placed within
the field directly above the flat disk, he recorded up to a 2%
cancellation of gravity. Presently Dr Ning Li of the University of
Alabama, Huntsville, along with NASA's Marshall Manned Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are working on a similar device. Go,
NASA.

It seems to me, that if science fiction is supposed to portray imaginary
high tech space propulsion, field effect is the way to go. 

Copyright © 1998 by David Sunga
This review and others like it can be found at 
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