Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: [email-masked] (Cheng-Jih Chen)
Date: 10 Jul 1998 03:42:22 GMT

Yes!  A movie less plausible than "Independence Day"!  And I'm counting
the Giant Lizard Steps on New York movie, though that one came close
(Especially when they didn't take the FDR to get to the Brooklyn
Bridge.  The 59th Street Bridge was closer anyway.)

I saw an early screening of "Armageddon" on Sunday morning.  What can I
say but that the laws of physics are strung up by the thumbs and
violated in the worst way, that the folks on screen are cut from
varying thicknesses and grades of cardboard, that the broad outlines of
the film are trivially predictable, that the bomb is defused/asteroid
destroyed with 3 second left on the clock, that the special effects
departments are the biggest component of the credits and that there's a
cute dog that doesn't die?  

Remarkably and innovatively, New York City is only slightly damaged by
horizontally streaking, slow moving meteors.  It's Paris that gets it,
perhaps because of some issue with the French.  This is also the first
movie I've seen with a NASA disclaimer at the end, right next to the
"No Animals Were Harmed":  NASA neither promotes nor endorses the
contents of this film.  To sum up, it's a summer flick, one of those
delicate perenniels that must be cultivated in intense AC and popcorn.
The question is whether it's a good summer flick or a bad one.  I lean
towards not bad, certainly a good cut above "Godzilla" (which says
little), but not particularly memorable either.

I missed the first asteroid-with-an-attitude movie.  Mixed reviews,
and all I really wanted to see was the big tidal wave in "Deep Impact".
Ten minutes of effects would not be worth nine bucks and two hours of
Hallmark-like platitudes.  It'll be at a second run house soon enough,
so it might be worthwhile then.

In any case, for "Armageddon", they decided to go for serious hyperbole
in the size of the rock.  After carefully pointing out that the
proposed dinosaur killer was about six miles wide (and then correctly
showing the impact to be just off Cancun), they made the new rock
something the size of Texas.  Why not the size of Alaska, while we're
at it?  It'll hit in eighteen days, and Earth's only hope is to send up
Bruce Willis and his deep drilling team into space aboard spiffy,
remarkably maneuverable and very roomy space shuttles.  The idea is to
drill into the rock, drop a standard issue nuclear bomb down this hole,
and blow up the thing that way.  Perhaps no one noticed that there have
been innumerable underground nuclear tests, perhaps not in Texas but
certainly in nearby Nevada, and none of them have cut much of a hole on
the earth's surface.  Nuclear weapons really aren't hammers of god, at
least compared to large hunks of rock and metal.

But this asteroid is remarkable.  Not only can it be shattered by a
dinky bomb, its surface is covered with crystal growths, retains an
atmosphere sufficient to generate a melodramatic wind, has gravity out
of proportion to its size (except when inconvenient to plot), and blows
up in a Big Ring Explosion (so fashionable with big bangs in modern
movies, but apparently the result of misreading of Vietnam war
footage).  This asteroid has an attitude, a touch of sentience or at
least petulence regarding Willis's drilling activity, hailing the drill
site with small rocks and methane flares at dramatically convenient,
must-push-button times.  Oh, methane: a by-product of biological
activity, right?  I suppose all this indicates that the asteroid is
really alive, its spawn of little baby meteors having the power to seek
out concentrations of human habitation, and it just happens to be
pissed at the French.

The most important thing is that the special effects are decent, not
great, but decent.  "Lost in Space" probably has the best effects so
far this year, and "Armageddon" doesn't come that close.  The second
most important thing is the soundtrack.  No Celine Dion, so it's OK --
I guess having Liv Tyler in the movie means at least one Aerosmith
song.  In terms of plot and character development, well, they make an
attempt, which is much, much more than what can be said about
"Godzilla", but how much can you do without getting in the way of the
special effects?

They actually set up a couple of conflicts and relationships.  There's
a father-daughter conflict, between Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler, and
there's a father-prodigy conflict, with Bruce and Ben Affleck.  Stuff
gets resolved by the end: Bruce and Liv reconcile, Bruce and Ben learn
to trust each other.  We should not be surprised.  A better question
may be, how well do these actors pull off the emotional torture thing?
Well, Liv is sort of there, but not really.  Ben does his Angry Young
Hotshot thing reasonably well; he was better in "Good Will Hunting" by
far, though that may be because he had more screen time and more to
do.  Bruce is OK.  It's a less interesting role than, say, "Twelve
Monkeys", but he's quite sufficient.

Besides this, there was the handy ad campaign that showed each major
character's face with some tag line underneath, like "He's doing it for
the money", "He's doing it for his country" or "He's doing it for the
donuts."  First time I saw these at a bus stop, I couldn't figure out
what they were selling.  Sneakers?  The advertising, however, is false,
as these strokes of character and personality are all but invisible in
the actual movie.  "Seven Samurai" this is not.

The amount of American rah-rah jingoism is actually remarkable.  In
some ways, images of the American flag and America as savior of the
world (no, let me rephrase: "Savior of the World") are more pronounced
than in, say, "Independence Day".  At least there, we felt a sense of
wackiness to the proceedings, and the jingoism is, well, obvious.
"Armageddon" does it more seriously and more subtly, mainly by putting
the Stars and Stripes in the background when Bruce Willis makes a
speach about honor and loyalty.  It's not a big can't-miss-me flag, a
la "Patton", but it's there.

Oh, there was a preview for "Blade" just before this movie.  I really
want to see it, if only so I can say, "humpf, Buffy can kick Blade's
ass."

-- 
"The court determined that Fox TV does not impede free and fair
competition in the teen-angst soap-com genre, therefore Party of Five
need not be broken into five 'Parties of One,' one being distributed to
each of the other networks."