Subject: Review: Armageddon (1998)

From: James Sanford <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 Sep 1998 16:28:42 GMT

ARMAGEDDON
Directed by Michael Bay
A case could probably be made that Jerry Bruckheimer and the late
Don Simpson are the two men most responsible for the sorry state of the
American movie blockbuster. Why was "Godzilla" so godawful? Why did "Speed
2" crash and burn last year? Why did 99 percent of the people who saw it
despise "Batman & Robin"?
It all goes back to a little movie called "Flashdance."
Back in 1983, then-fledgling producers Simpson and Bruckheimer took
what was essentially a wisp of an idea -- blue-collar girl dreams of
becoming a ballerina -- gussied it up with eye-scorching visuals, set it to
a pulsating soundtrack, chopped it together to look like the longest,
sexiest MTV clip ever and made a film that became an overnight phenomenon.
Cashing in on the rah-rah jingoism of the Reagan era, the duo put together
fighter jets, Tom Cruise and a handful of power-ballads and created "Top
Gun," a sort of "Flashdance Goes To War."
The immense success of these pictures did not go unnoticed by the
rest of the film industry, and soon the prevailing attitude in Hollywood
seemed to be, "Who cares about characters, plot or dialogue? Just make it
look really hot!". Though Simpson and Bruckheimer's magic formula finally
lost its fizzle when Cruise's "Days of Thunder" (jokingly referred to by
many as "Top Car") quickly ran out of gas at the box-office in 1990, by then
the damage was already done: Years of seeing films that emphasized style
over substance had shaped the minds and tastes of a new generation of
would-be filmmakers who have devoutly followed The Gospel According To
Simpson And Bruckheimer. These are the folks who churn out movies like
"Batman & Robin," "Speed 2" and "Godzilla," expensive packages that look
sensational but are really just concepts in search of development.
Michael Bay is one such young director. Trained in the arena of
music videos, where no shot can last more than three seconds and chaos is
something to achieve rather than avoid, Bay proved in his first features
"Bad Boys" and "The Rock" that even though he can't actually tell a story,
he can make whatever's going on look plenty exciting. Shoot the people we
should admire from low angles, go into slow-motion every time something
important is about to take place, make sure everybody sweats picturesquely,
and you're halfway home.
Bay's hyperactive style gets a workout in the Bruckheimer-produced
"Armageddon," a breathless and utterly brainless the-sky-is-falling epic
that's so cold and contrived it makes the similarly themed and much more
sentimental "Deep Impact" look like "Schindler's List" by comparison. What
matters most to Bay and the "Armageddon" screenwriters is destruction
instead of drama and pyrotechnics, not people. Its almost total incoherence
makes "Armageddon" a kind of breakthrough: This may be the first movie
that's actually just a 150-minute trailer for itself.
The special effects are generally impressive, particularly an
opening attack on New York by a swarm of blazing meteorites and an
otherworldly storm in the last half-hour. In between those exciting segments
is a plot any seven-year-old could spot the holes in, yet "Armageddon" wears
its stupidity as a badge of honor, like the loud-mouthed class moron who
tries to make intelligent classmates feel ashamed of their good grades. It
can't be a coincidence that every character in the movie with a college
education turns out to be ineffectual or prissy and that the burden of
saving the world falls on the brawny shoulders of a bunch of hard-livin'
roughnecks who don't let silly things like rules and regulations hold them
back. Perhaps the biggest shock in "Armageddon" comes when these former oil
drillers submit their list of demands to be met in exchange for going into
space to stop the Texas-size asteroid that's about to terminate all life on
Earth: Although they ask never to have to pay taxes again and to get all
their parking tickets fixed, the boys forget to insist the "Porky's" trilogy
be brought along as the in-flight entertainment.
The leader of the mission is maverick drilling legend Harry S.
Stamper, played by Bruce Willis as a man with all the imagination and
passion of a metronome. For some reason, as Willis' paychecks have grown
substantially larger over the years, his performances have become less and
less interesting. Look back at a "Moonlighting" repeat or the original "Die
Hard" and you'll see an actor who wanted to entertain people. Look at
"Armageddon" and you'll see a self-satisfied star waiting to be adored.
Stamper has a twentysomething daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) who's
secretly wrinkling the sheets with Stamper's protege A.J. (Ben Affleck).
When Stamper first learns of the couple's afternoon delights, he responds by
grabbing a shotgun and chasing A.J. all over an oil rig, blasting away
recklessly while "black gold" rains down on one and all. This scene occurs
about ten minutes into "Armageddon," and offers a preview of the
documentary-style realism to come in the next two hours and 20 minutes.
Almost immediately after this lighthearted escapade, Stamper and
Grace are seized by government agents and whisked off to Washington, where
NASA honcho Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) begs Stamper to help destroy the
killer rock that's hurtling toward our planet at 22,000 miles per hour. "Not
a soul on Earth can hide from it," Truman warns, although lines such as this
may cause the audience to wonder if he's referring to the asteroid or
Disney's insanely expensive worldwide marketing campaign for "Armageddon."
>From this point on, you can probably put together the rest of the
movie yourself. Just cut your I.Q. in half and remember to spice up your
confused action sequences with rollicking comic interludes of the sort
generally not found outside straight-to-video "Ernest" flicks. Halfway
through "Armageddon" a goofy, English-mangling Cosmonaut (Peter Stormare)
turns up to do an extended hommage to that oft-ignored quipmaster Yakov
Smirnoff. To quote another former space traveller, "Oh, the pain, the
pain!".
Affleck, sporting distractingly bright new caps on his teeth that are
hardly in keeping with his character's hard-scrabble past, generally looks
lost amidst the fireworks. Tyler's portrayal shows once and for all she's
the Daryl Hannah of the '90s, a beautiful face with no personality and in
dire need of a strong director to bring out her potential. Hannah lucked out
in such films as "Roxanne" and "Steel Magnolias"; Tyler was perfectly fine
in "That Thing You Do" and "Stealing Beauty." But Bay isn't the kind of
director who cares about performances anyhow: As long as you can shout your
dialogue over the ruckus in the background, you're O.K. in his book.
Though Thornton lends a certain gravity to a colorless part, the
only actor who really enlivens "Armageddon" is Steve Buscemi, whose frequent
zingers are so much sharper than anything else in the script -- most of
"Armageddon"'s dialogue consists of variations on "I've got to inform the
President," "Suck it up," and the ever-popular "Go! Go! Go!" -- it would not
be a shock to discover they were ad-libbed. The only other moments of humor
in this turgid experience come from the filmmakers' attempts to visualize
life in the American Midwest, which they see as a place somewhere between
"The Waltons" and "The Grapes of Wrath," with ancient trucks, antique
radios, Moms in cotton housedresses and young'uns cavorting in rickety
homemade go-carts they might well have borrowed from The Little Rascals.
What a wonderful world it would be if "Armageddon" opened at the local
picture show and all the real-life Midwesterners stayed home to listen to
Buck Rogers radio dramas and read Flash Gordon comics instead.
James Sanford