

ARMAGEDDON *1/2 (out of four)
-a review by Bill Chambers
(Film, DVD, LD reviews! A section where YOU can recommend movies!
Fabric softener! All in one!
FILM FREAK CENTRAL
http://www.geocities.com/~billchambers
New address. New attitude. Same purple prose.)

starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck
written by Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J.  Abrams
directed by Michael Bay

It rocks—actually, lots of rocks fly at us or from us, in slow or
fast motion, at several points in the film. They seem like dangerous
rocks because they kind of twirl through the air instead of just
propelling forward, and when they land—once in a while, when we
need a break from the space sequences—they cause damage enough to
destroy the Chrysler building and the like. (Nary a mention of these
apocalyptic events is made after they occur.) They also just might be
the most interesting element of ARMAGEDDON, a steroid user’s answer
to Deep Impact.

Bruce Willis stars as Harry Stamper, a famed oil-driller commissioned
by the White House and NASA to stop a giant asteroid before it travels
beyond "zero barrier" and destroys our planet. Why an oil driller?
They require someone experience with deep-core mining to plant a
nuclear missile into said asteroid. (In one unintentionally (?)
hilarious sequence, NASA asks Harry to inspect a deep-core driller
they built based on his blueprints; it is poorly constructed—Harry
criticizes almost every aspect of it. We trust NASA to build space
shuttles?) Harry assembles the obligatory "ragtag" bunch of "cowboys",
including a blond guy, a fat guy, a black guy, a wiseass, and the man
who is sleeping with his daughter (Affleck). Once they reach space, we
experience sequence after sequence of something going wrong—perhaps
the fact that they sent a bunch of nincompoops into outer space has
something to do with it; I cannot count the number of times they
almost fail the mission on all my fingers and toes. Whether or not
they save the day, I will not reveal. Nor will you care.

I will say this: you know you’re in trouble when Deep Impact dwarfs
your asteroid movie in terms of emotion and scope. Willis has barely a
chance to come alive; ditto for Affleck.  Their big scenes are mostly
reserved for the third act, in a last minute—and futile—attempt
to inject warmth into the material. Steve Buscemi’s
character—the wiseass—is exceptionally problematic. "Rockhound",
as he’s called, is sarcastic and foolish, so they tape him to a
chair, where he spends most of the film. So why did they bring him up
there to begin with? Rather, why write him into the film?—give his
almost-witty one-liners to serious Willis, who scowls and mopes and
demonstrates psychotic tendencies: at one point he chases after
Affleck with his shotgun for screwing his daughter, firing often and
causing significant damage to his oil rig. I’m guessing he
qualifies under NASA guidelines as someone unfit for space travel, at
least in my world where the sky is blue. Liv Tyler is pretty and
humourless, as always; suspiciously, four of her father’s band’s
("Aerosmith") songs grace the soundtrack. Director Michael Bay lays
the visual and sound effects on thick, like ketchup, eventually
drowning the movie on-screen. (The middle hour is a non-sensical,
pyrotechnic assault on the average primate’s brain.) Whenever
someone dies in this movie, a crew member inevitably yells out "We
lost (insert dead person’s last name here)!" I must admit that not
once could I distinguish a dead oil-guy-cum-astronaut from a live one,
and close-ups of the corpses’ faces beneath cracked helmets
provided little assistance, as their skin was often covered in fake
blood.

ARMAGEDDON is not as terrible movie as Godzilla. It looks nicer, and
has fewer plot-holes within its equally ludicrous framework. It has a
vivid soundmix. But at almost two-and-a-half hours, I could not
believe how little actually happened over the course of the story. The
love story has been played up in the ads, perhaps hoping to catch
people before they recover from Titanic-fever. Bollocks! The lovers in
the film are miles apart throughout—erase all thoughts of nude
sketching or car-sex and replace them with obligatory shots of Liv
Tyler tearing up while Ben Affleck dicks around in a moon-crawler.

Remember a little film called Jaws? In this film, three
independent-minded men suddenly found themselves on a fishing boat in
pursuit of a deadly shark. They didn’t much like each other at
first; eventually, they started to respect one another. One of
Jaws’ great scenes involved the would-be-Ahabs drinking and singing
songs and telling stories. This is the sort of male-bonding foreign to
Bay or his producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, who throw too many characters
into the mix and expect we’ll care about them on the grounds that
the world is about to end. Not once do we get the feeling that these
characters are even acquaintances—I’d be surprised if these
actors bothered to introduce themselves to one another before "action"
was called. A male friend who loved the film suggested to me that
perhaps I cannot relate to a bunch of men who don’t bare their
souls, who believe in dying macho concepts like heroism and a kind of
chest-beating bravery. To this, I will respond that the boys in
ARMAGEDDON are neither heroic, nor brave, nor smart, even: this team
couldn’t build a birdhouse. And if I get no respect for disliking a
movie with all the synthetic feeling of a trailer—a trailer for a
movie written by a team of body-builders and greeting card
authors—I’ve never been a prouder wimp my whole life.

                                     -July, 1998.