Another guilty pleasure
Armageddon A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman
*** (Out of ****)
Guilty pleasures are secret little joys of life. Things that we're not supposed to enjoy because they're not hip and they're certainly not good for us. Velveeta cheese, Reeses Cups, silly sit-coms. We sneak these in every once and a while but don't mention them as we're munching brie and imported chocolate while discussing PBS specials.
Here's my confession: "Armageddon" is great fun. It's as intelligent as a Twinkie, but, ohhhh, that cream filling!
An asteroid the size of Texas is hurling towards Earth and we have 18 days to do something about it. A "Global Killer", it will wipe out all life on the planet -- not even bacteria will survive. Not to worry though, NASA has a plan. They're going to land on the rock, drill 800 feet into it, stuff a couple of nukes down the hole and split the thing in half sending it away from our lovely home world.
Their problem is that the trained astronauts don't have much hole-digging experience. Agency head Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) turns to the best oil man on the planet, cantankerous Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis). Stamper brings in his team of misfits to learn how to be outer space heroes and they're a not exactly the guys that NASA would have picked to stick in the shuttle to save the world. As one of the legit astronauts says, "Talk about the wrong stuff."
It's the usual "Dirty Dozen" gang: AJ (Ben Affleck), the young headstrong rebel; Chick (Will Patton), a gambler with a child who doesn't know him; Rockhound (Steve Buscemi), the genius crazed lothario; and the rest of the rag-tag cowboys you've come to expect -- the muscular black guy, the gentle fat guy and more.
After some fun and games at NASA, they blast off in two shuttles piloted by real astronauts. Refueling at a Russian space station they pick up a loony cosmonaut who has been alone a bit too long as the station explodes into flames.
When they get to the asteroid, everything that could possibly go wrong does as they fight the doomsday clock. Bet you didn't see that coming.
There's remarkably little story and virtually no characterization. Stamper isn't even as filled out as Willis' usual characters are. All the drillers are cartoon people. We're supposed to get to know them in the very few moments devoted to bringing them to life in the two and a half hour film.
There are two chances to identify them. When they are picked up by G-men for the mission each is doing something that is supposed to help us figure out who they are. Rockhound is propositioning a married woman in a sleazy New Orleans bar, someone is out in the desert on a big motorcycle outrunning the cops. Later, just before blast-off, they get a night off. Chick visits his estranged kid, most of the rest get into a bar fight.
But it doesn't work. At one point, several characters die. After the film, we tried to figure out who they were, but no one could remember. They were not people, just bodies.
AJ and Stamper's daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) are in love much to her daddy's displeasure. Their romance adds a touch of humanity to the film, but just a touch. Mostly she hangs around Mission Control doe-eyed, sobbing about the danger that her father and fiance are in.
During the first half of the film, Thornton is such a stand-out that the other actors pale by comparison. Cast against his previous redneck roles, he does a fine job as the harried NASA chief who yearns for space.
The movie is filled with bad science (some objects on the asteroid act as if they were in Earth's gravity), incomprehensible ideas (NASA sends giant machine guns into space?) and cinematic cliches (in disarming a bomb, do they cut the blue wire or the red one?). Everything...let me repeat that... _everything_ is done at absolutely the last possible second. And you can tell by the digital readouts.
But, you know, who cares? The special effects are amazing. When relatively little meteors hit New York, buildings get blown up real good. (The Chrysler Building is taken out yet again.) Paris is spectacularly vaporized. There are enough explosions and fire to satisfy anyone.
Director Michael Bay ("The Rock") used to direct music videos and commercials and it shows. There's seemingly an edit every two seconds which works well to create an intense feeling of excitement and hide the lack of story. It does makes things confusing. In several scenes, it's difficult to figure out exactly what is going on. Who is where? What is what?
As fun as it is, "Armageddon" is only one-third of a movie. The earlier death-from-the-sky film "Deep Impact" was more intellectually satisfying but lacking any sense of excitement. Both are peopled with characters that you don't really care about. Once again we are left to wonder why someone can't make an edge of the seat movie that makes sense and features real people.
It's traditional that, at the end of each century, the doomsday prophets appear in full-force. As we approach the end of this millennium, our story-tellers are giving us what we want. Some say the end of the world will come in fire, others say water. Hollywood says giant rocks from above. The most interesting theory is that our way of life will radically change not with a bang, but with the gentle double-zero.
(Michael Redman has been writing this column for over 23 years and he's thinking about making a fried baloney and Velveeta sandwich on white bread, but don't tell anyone. Redman@bvoice.com is the eaddress for confessing your guilty pleasures.)
[This appeared in the 7/9/98 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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