Subject: Reviews: Dark Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998)

From: "Jerry Bosch" <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Jul 1998 05:03:01 GMT

THE DEEP IMPACT OF ARMAGEDDON - RANDOM THOUGHTS

Warning: spoilers ahead.

It is summer and the sky is falling. Hollywood has been deeply impacted and
it has met the celestial army head on.

When space shuttles are launched from Cape Canaveral hardly anything ever
goes wrong but when they are launched from Hollywood we can expect lots of
trouble because trouble is what summer blockbusters are about. Impending
doom is not enough; you must deliver doom, as in Deep Impact; or experience
near doom in the process of avoiding it, as in Armageddon.

Deep Impact and Armageddon use different approaches to the problem of
delivering disaster. If you are going to have Armageddon, then you must (a)
have a flawed plan to avoid it and (b) limit Armageddon to less than
Armageddon, since total oblivion is much too bleak for summer fare. That is
the case with Deep Impact, which delivers a watered down version of
Armageddon. On the other hand, if you are going to avoid Armageddon
altogether, as is the case with Armageddon, you must (a) satisfy the
disaster expectations with shallow impacts and (b) dedicate yourself to the
proposition that every solution has a problem. The world finally survives,
but the devil is in saving it.

If disbelief is the coin of admission, Armageddon comes at a higher price.
Deep Impact can afford to be realistic, because it plans to deliver the
goods (Armageddon). Armageddon, however,  after getting the minidisasters
out the way, must strain credulity to the limit and well beyond in terms of
tactical crises as a substitute for Armageddon. In Armageddon you get not
one digital countdown but two. Taking both to the last second would have
been in terrible taste, so the blue and the green wires, or the red and the
yellow or whatever the colors, are cut with 3 seconds to spare in the first
case. That significant sacrifice is the price that the screenwriters paid
for the indulgence of avoiding the end of the world in the second case by
the slim margin of just one second, which is the accepted standard.

Both films are curiously faithful to the notion of a sacrificial lamb. I
would be loath to accuse Christ of setting a bad precedent, but perhaps out
of respect Hollywood refused to spare the world without the sacrifice of a
hero. The fact that Hollywood felt compelled to put Christian formula ahead
of Hollywood formula may be credibly used by the religious crowd as another
example of the deep stronghold of the value-trader ethic in our culture. As
a result we have two perfectly good actors, Robert Duvall and Bruce Willis
going down in a style completely foreign to the image of the indestructible,
infallible summer superhero.

Any film in which humanity is bracing itself for imminent death will become
a corn field at some point. The poignant good byes in Deep Impact involve
characters that we either don’t know or care little for. As a result the
sentimental farewells are maudlin and slightly annoying. By contrast, the
corresponding scenes in Armageddon are integrated in the story. For the most
part they are effective and well acted.

In Deep Impact Robert Duvall delivers the competent job that is expected
from a veteran of his caliber. Tea Leoni played her part too well for her
own good. She was transparent: we saw the character and not the actress,
which is good, and she played without Pacino hysterics or Nicholson
histrionics, which should also be good. However, Hollywood (read audiences)
does not reward that kind of integrity. The character was authentic and
unfortunately, as such, not terribly likeable and a little bit dull. Ron
Eldard was well behaved but lacked the gravity that is expected from a
mission commander. Perhaps it is his voice, or it may be that asking him and
us to make the transition from tubal imebecility to wide-screen rocket
science is more than he and we could handle. In Armageddon, Bruce Willis and
Ben Affleck, neither of which aspire to make us forget Maurice Evans,
communicated surprisingly well the dimensions that should surface when
substantial men of action face moral dilemmas. The inevitable
father-daughter conflict  was dead serious business in Deep Impact.  In
Armageddon it fluctuated between comedy relief and real emotion. This was
just one case of the tongue-in-cheek approach with which Armageddon
mollified the core of conflict which was none the less communicated in full
measure. Steve Buscemi and Bob Thornton contributed strong performances in
Armageddon.

Deep Impact’s supporting cast was star studded, some of them burned out and
others still (elsewhere) incandescent: Vanessa “The Van” Redgrave,
Maximilian Schell, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell. Good actors with little
to do but stay ahead of their creditors or advance the custodial accounts as
the case may be. The Oscar however goes to MSNBC, who steals the show with
its unseen but pervasive presence. Shades of Rebecca.

The chances that any of my readers may let the summer pass without seeing
either or both of these films are less than the chances of an asteroid hit
on Earth. But if by force of the gravity of unusual circumstances you may
find yourself so impacted, don’t go into a deep depression; it is not the
end of the world . Raise your  arms and head on to the next show. After all,
the films are likely to re-orbit.

Am I full of rocket exhaust? Yell at me at
[email-masked].