Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: Martin Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Jul 1998 15:57:20 GMT

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it"- Santyana

...Blah, blah, blah. Man, I don't know about you, but I am truly tired
of hearing that quote. Not that it isn't true, mind you, but it's
invoked way too often and usually in conjunction with denouncing the
horrors of the Holocaust, slavery or the South during post-Civil
War Reconstruction.  What bummers!   Personally, I believe the quote's
validity can proven with a more contemporary and less
grandiose atrocity ...say for instance, Bruce Willis.

  Today's history lesson takes us back to 1988- A time when the
'one-man-army' action movie genre looked to be on it's last leg. It
seemed that Stallone's and Schwarzenegger's best work was behind them
and their movies were vying with each other to see which
could most resemble a Tex Avery cartoon. Then, out of nowhere came a
little movie named DIE HARD.
    What set DIE HARD apart from the others wasn't so much how smart the
script was,  it was the clever twist of the main
character: not an ex- Green Beret, ex-mercenary, ex-CIA agent, but just
a NY City cop. A regular Joe. One of us.  No longer could a
building full of hostages only be rescued by  an Austrian Superman. It
could just as well be an average guy who used his brain and had
a rudimentary knowledge of firearms. "Hell, it could've been me!"
    What made it all even more of a 'goof' was that it was Bruce Willis
in the role of John McClane.  Balding and not 'matinee idol'
handsome but charming in his own simian sort of way. Not really out of
shape but not a person who'd choose a protein shake over a
beer. In fact, he was already famous for hawking wine coolers and being
MOONLIGHTING's David Addison: smart mouthed,
blitzed-out party guy. A slacker. A screw up. "Hell, if Bruce could do
it I KNOW I could do it!"   It was a 'goof' on top of a 'goof'.
    So what happened? While we all high-fived and celebrated how funny
the punchline was we somehow forgot the joke it was
attached to. During this bout of amnesia Reality folded in on itself and
Bruce Willis became known as a legitimate action hero. He was
invited to become a partner in Planet Hollywood and was parodied
alongside Schwarzenegger and Stallone on such tv shows as
ANIMANIACS and DUCKMAN. Our forgetfulness yielded a condemnation that
was quick and severe and in the form of THE LAST
BOY SCOUT, LAST MAN STANDING, THE JACKAL, MERCURY RISING and most
recently ARMAGEDDON.

    In the first five minutes of ARMAGEDDON New York is devastated by a
shower of VW-sized meteors. The Powers-That-Be
discover that they are actually the by-product of a giant asteroid
plummeting toward Earth...with an ETA of 18 days!  Since detonating
all of the worlds nuclear bombs on the surface of the asteroid would do
no more damage than a firecracker held in an open palm
(????), the government enlists the aid of Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis),
the greatest oil drilling 'wildcat' in the world. Harry and his
ragtag team of roughnecks blast off into outer space to implant a nuke
in the asteroid and save the world. Between numerous mishaps
and their own hijinx, though, there may not be enough time.

  Double deja vu, huh? Just last year we had two disaster movies about
erupting volcanoes (DANTE'S PEAK, VOLCANO) and this
year we have two movies about the imminent destruction of Earth by
meteors. I figured the obvious thing to do here would be to
compare and contrast DEEP IMPACT (a more realistic and sensitive look at
the last days of Earth, reminiscent of TESTAMENT and
THE DAY AFTER) to ARMAGEDDON (uh...it blows up stuff real good), but
I've decided against it .

    "...OF ALL THE MOVIES THIS SUMMER, ARMAGEDDON IS THE BEST..."
   -raves Martin Thomas of The Reel Deal

 -Hey, rather than let the studio assign a truncated pre-fab quote to me
(like so many other lesser critics who just want to hear their
name on tv), I just saved them the work. Of course, what follows "... "
would be:

 "...AT TYPIFYING EVERYTHING THAT'S GENERALLY INSIPID ABOUT BIG SUMMER
MOVIES!"

    ARMAGEDDON is a brain dead, suspense-free, artless movie with
scribble pad characters, a 'make-it-up-as-we-go' plot, Aerosmith
songs every 15 minutes (did I mention that it also stars Liv Tyler), and
has a sense of humor that is of, by, and for middle-aged frat
boys.
    Other than bringing in people who like independent movies, Steve
Buscemi's and Billy Bob Thorton's only purpose seems to be to
share scenes with Bruce Willis and drive home the point of what a rotten
actor he is. There's no sense of urgency and you never feel
that the world is really going to end...and you don't care! The
characters in the movie sure don't seem to. With only two days left to
save the Earth they take a night off to go to a strip club.
     Probably the worst thing about ARMAGEDDON is knowing that it's
gonna make more money than God.

     ARMAGEDDON is a studio exec's wet dream. It's a combination of TRUE
LIES, INDEPENDENCE DAY and CON AIR
synthesized in a lab with everything fun, clever or new already
extracted.  It fits perfectly into it's genealogy of TWISTER-ID4-THE
LOST WORLD-SPEED 2-BATMAN & ROBIN-GODZILLA-***.  Movies that promise the
world then do an insulting bit of 'bait and
switch'.  Movies we'll sometimes like only because we had our hearts so
set on it. It's the history lesson we never seem to learn.
'Santyanna's lament' I call it.
    I suppose compared to an F-5 tornado that only kills two people, an
alien technology that interfaces with a MacIntosh computer, a
T-Rex that drinks water from a chlorinated pool rather than a nearby
ocean, a Bat-credit card, and a lizard that's as tall as a skyscraper
yet small enough to lay eggs in Madison Square Garden, I guess an
asteroid the size of Texas not being detected until eighteen days
before impact is not all that outrageous. Even when you consider that
XF11, the real life mile-wide meteor's brush with Earth has been
pinpointed thirty years in advance (Oct. 16 2028 1:30pm). I guess I'm
just nitpicking now.

"Dude, it was just meant to be a rollercoaster ride movie and there's
something wrong with you if you can't just sit back
and enjoy it! You can't compare it to a 'thinking' movie."

    So, is this what we've come to?  Do I now not compare the cooking of
Paul Prudhomme to that of Wolfgang Puck, but rather the
taste of a corn-fed cow's dung to that of a  slaughterhouse cow?  This
has all made me question my judgement and put me in a self-
reflexive mood.
     It's not like I haven't loved movies that either require you to
check your brain at the door (SPAWN, THE SAINT) or movies where
the lead actor can't hold his accent (THE GHOST & THE DARKNESS, THE
DEVIL'S ADVOCATE) or movies with terrible dialogue
(WILD THINGS, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS).
    I think the key word is EITHER/ OR, as opposed to AND. I guess I
require that a movie have SOME merit other than lining the
pockets of hack directors and schlock producers (you know who you are).
    Sure, it's possible to "check your brain" and enjoy ARMAGEDDON, but
you may be too embarrassed to ask for it back afterwards.
It might have some questions you don't want to answer.

-MARTIN

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