Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: Kevin Patterson <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Jul 1998 16:29:03 GMT

Film review by Kevin Patterson

ARMAGEDDON
Rating: **1/2 (out of four)
PG-13, 1998
Director: Michael Bay
Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer
Screenplay: Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams
Starring Cast: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler,
Steve Buscemi.

After GODZILLA disappointed, both critically and commercially, and DEEP
IMPACT turned out not to be an action movie in the strict sense, July of
1998 has rolled around without an action blockbuster having hit the
theaters. Expectations have accordingly been high for ARMAGEDDON, in which
a team of roughnecks led by Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) are sent into
outer space for the purpose of drilling a hole inside an asteroid on a
collision course with Earth and then blowing it up from the inside. It
certainly seems to have all the right ingredients: it has Bruce Willis in
the lead, it has a premise ripe with potential for big explosions and
stunts (along with a bit of flag-waving), and the producer/director team of
Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay had been responsible for the 1996 action
hit THE ROCK.

Unfortunately, that's really about all it has. Don't misunderstand:
ARMAGEDDON entertains. But aside from the few real moments of heroism at
the end, I liked it mostly for the same reasons that Beavis and Butt-head
would probably like it: because a lot of stuff got blown up, and that was
cool. Since its plot (Our Heroes vs. Big Inanimate Object) is about as thin
as they come, it has to keep moving mostly on the basis of Murphy's Law: a
fuel tank explodes during an intermediate stop at a space station, one of
the two shuttles is damaged by debris from the asteroid, the nuclear bomb
intended to destroy the asteroid is about to go off early, the drills keep
breaking, a character comes down with "space dementia," and finally the
bomb mechanism is broken and someone has to stay behind and detonate the
bomb manually.

I won't waste time pointing out how the storyline is implausible (which it
is), since these kinds of movies do not sink or swim with their scientific
credibility. I will point out, however, that it's kind of sloppy. The
screenplay reportedly passed through the word processors of nine different
writers, and it shows in places. There are a few characters introduced
towards the beginning, such as a goofy astronomer with a nagging wife and a
few New York City tourists who get scared up by a meteor shower, who then
disappear with no indication of why they were in the script in the first
place. Steve Buscemi's character, Rockhound, apparently got his Ph.D at age
22, yet he later makes an asinine comment about how NASA's proposed flight
plan resembles a failed stunt from a Road Runner cartoon that would insult
the intelligence of most high school physics students. There's also some
hokey dialogue that I would have thought at least one of the nine writers
ought to have edited. (Note to whoever was responsible for the scene where
the bomb is about to go off: it's fine to write a scene that turns into a
surrealistic nightmare, but actually having a character announce "This has
turned into a surrealistic nightmare!" doesn't come off too well.)

Characters in these kinds of action movies don't have to be well-developed,
but they at least ought to be animated and fun to watch. Aside from Harry
Stamper and Rockhound, most of them are pretty bland: the rest of Stamper's
squad consist of pretty much stock macho characters. Their tough-guy antics
in front of the NASA training team and sarcastic one-liners are mildly
amusing, but the only time I really laughed out loud was when Buscemi
started trying to replicate a scene from DR. STRANGELOVE. For a movie that
barely comes in under the 150-minute mark, some of this seems like dead
weight (not to mention that it completely undermines any sense that the
world might really be about to end, but I'm not even going to get started
on that). There's also a romance between A.J. (Ben Affleck) and Harry's
daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) that doesn't add a whole lot to the story.

Director Michael Bay keeps the action going pretty much non-stop for the
final half of the movie. While it certainly serves to keep the audience's
adrenaline rushing, some of it unfolds in a rather confusing way. I'm still
not sure exactly what went wrong on board the space station: all I know was
that there were some sparks flying, some incomprehensible shouting from a
Russian cosmonaut (Peter Stormare), and then a Narrow Escape and a Big
Explosion. There's nothing visually distinct about ARMAGEDDON except for a
few surface shots of the asteroid: at one point, the flying rock, the
shouting, and the camera-shaking went on for so long that I actually caught
myself starting to tune out for about a minute, and that's one thing that
shouldn't happen in an action movie.

ARMAGEDDON turns up the action meter in a way few movies often do, but its
coherence meter is somewhere near the bottom. It's good entertainment, and
it meets the minimum requirements for a summer blockbuster. Still, I'd be
surprised if I remember much of it a year from now. Except, of course, that
a lot of stuff got blown up. And that was cool.

Send comments to [email-masked].

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