ARMAGEDDON (1998)
Rating: 2.0 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out *********************************
Directed by: Michael Bay
Screenplay: Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams
Starring: Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Peter Stormare, Steve Buscemi, Seiko Matsuda
Ingredients: Large asteroid, crew of misfit oil drillers who become astronauts, countdown timer with big green lights
Synopsis: In the beginning of ARMAGEDDON the voice of Charlton Heston explains that long ago in the Cretaceous Period, a 6-mile chunk of asteroid exterminated the world of the dinosaurs. When the rock struck, its instant vaporization threw so much dust and gas into the atmosphere that the sun was blocked long enough to kill off most plants and animals. In ARMAGEDDON a new rock - - this time 'the size of Texas' - - is poised to collide with the Earth. American heroes must save the world from certain disaster while the helpless international community follows the American heroes' exploits with awe and adoration.
Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and his hell-raising crew of eccentric oil drillers are considered the best drillers in the world. Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) as head of NASA recruits Stamper and the oilers for a mission to save humanity from extinction. NASA divides the oilers into two mission teams: one led by Stamper and the other led by Stamper's daughter's boyfriend AJ (Ben Affleck), a rival who doesn't get along with Stamper. Each team gets a mobile drilling rig, a space shuttle, and a nuclear bomb. Using Earthbound shuttles as space rockets, each team must slingshot around the moon, reach the giant asteroid, and drill 800 feet into it the asteroid in order to plant and explode a nuclear device - - so that hopefully the asteroid will be split into pieces and avoid colliding with Earth. Only one nuclear device is needed for success but the two rival teams are sent simultaneously to preclude failure.
On the mission, Stamper and the boys face perils such as the asteroid's selective gravity. Two-ton space vehicles containing crew members are in danger of floating off into free space. At the same time, two-ton rocks might crush the men as the boulders fall with resounding thuds on the airless asteroid's surface. Also, somebody has thoughtlessly equipped the mobile drilling rigs with Gatling machine guns.
Liv Tyler plays Stamper's daughter (and AJ's girlfriend) Grace, a pretty face who waits helplessly on Earth. There are also bits involving stereotyped minorities such as the chatterbox African American who shrieks in surprise, the overweight Samoan hit by a meteor, and the Asian couple who applaud Stamper when their faces get splattered with black oil. Japanese superstar entertainer Seiko Matsuda gets all of two seconds as an oblivious tourist who declares that she wants to go shopping during a meteor shower.
Can Stamper and the oil drilling guys save humanity from certain destruction?
Opinion: Speaking of doom, a New Age friend told me her theory about why DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON came out this summer. She says a 16th century doom-and-gloom prophet named Nostradamus wrote that a terror would fall from the sky next year "in the seventh month of 1999." Which could mean anything from a slingshot crash of NASA's plutonium-laden Cassini Probe to a terrorist on a parachute, if you believe in that sort of thing. But in Hollywood, it amounts to little more than coffee shop inspiration for summer asteroid movies such as DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON.
Getting back to ARMAGEDDON, it seems like there's a scene missing. In the movie, as time runs short, the crew led by AJ has a perfect opportunity to wake up, unpack their gear, start digging, plant their nuclear bomb, and save the Earth (and its 6 billion people). Instead, they go driving around the asteroid with the mobile drilling rig - - inexplicably wasting precious time sightseeing when the Earth (including AJ's girlfriend) is in immediate and dire jeopardy. Is AJ's nuke completely forgotten as a viable option in his mission?
At its heart ARMAGEDDON is mostly a rehash of stuff we've already seen before in other uninspiring movies. But at least the mediocre doomsday script is spiced up with implausible events (such as Gatling guns) to increase the number of booms and bangs.
The cinematography in ARMAGEDDON is noteworthy in that for two hours and 30 minutes the audience is hit with a dizzying mishmash of photographic angles nearly every second. Meanwhile, in the background music, suspenseful drumming goes on and on and on. All this changing scenery and ominous drumming is illusory fluff - - an obvious attempt to make it seem like something interesting is always about to happen. But the continuous images hold interest for only about an hour, then diminish in impact as nothing substantial really happens. On the other hand, being distracted from ARMAGEDDON's implausible plot while waiting for the ending to roll around might not be a bad thing.
In short, ARMAGEDDON consists of a few booms, a few bangs, lots of distracting images, and a period of waiting around for a possibly happy ending.
Reviewed July 1, 1998
Trivia (Sci Fi fans only): After the movie I wondered whether in reality we Americans would be able to use nukes to fend off a space rock the size of Texas (i.e. over a quarter million square miles), and found out that astronomers have actually done simulations. In the computer simulations using the rough equivalent of an atom bomb planted in an asteroid only a mile in size, the asteroid cracked up, but the pieces stayed on course to wipe out the Earth.
One thing that's always bugged me about sci fi movies is the use of rockets, which somehow seem kind of low tech, since rockets waste vast amounts of fuel and then run out. But in order to travel such vast distances, interstellar travel would require establishing a propulsion force that, unlike rocketry, doesn't use up much fuel.
For example, when you drop a penny, it experiences a force which pulls it in the direction of earth. This is because the penny is within a gravitational field which propels the penny towards Earth, without having to burn fuel. If the gravitational field pointed sideways, the penny would fall sideways. If the field pointed up, the penny would fall up. The penny always falls in the direction of the field, without having to burn fuel. Field is the key.
Field effect propulsion is perfect for sci fi space travel. Basically, in order to create a propulsive force to drive a spaceship in any direction without the use of fuel, all you have to do is establish a ship with its own field. Point the field in the direction you want to go, and you continue to "fall" in that direction forever. Point it in a different direction, and there you go.
Has the principle of field effect propulsion been demonstrated before in real life? Certainly. It's known as the Biefeld Brown effect, a weak phenomenon first observed by physicist/astronomer Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld as early as 1923. Biefeld created a strong electrostatic field in a simple capacitor (a capacitor is a sandwich made of two metal plates and gook in between) - - and the capacitor always levitated weakly towards the direction stipulated by its generated field. That was over seventy five years ago, in 1923, before big budgets and modern materials. Just imagine the kind of field effect propulsion we could achieve in a 1998 science fiction movie (or in real life using the movie's budget).
Most recently, in 1992 Dr Eugene Podkletnov of Tampere University, Finland published a paper describing research in which he using a special ceramic disk to produce a field in the direction opposing gravity. When non-metal and non-magnetic materials were placed within the field directly above the flat disk, he recorded up to a 2% cancellation of gravity. Presently Dr Ning Li of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, along with NASA's Marshall Manned Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are working on a similar device. Go, NASA.
It seems to me, that if science fiction is supposed to portray imaginary high tech space propulsion, field effect is the way to go.
Copyright © 1998 by David Sunga This review and others like it can be found at THE CRITIC ZOO: http://www.criticzoo.com email: zookeeper@criticzoo.com
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