Film review by Kevin Patterson
ARMAGEDDON Rating: **1/2 (out of four) PG-13, 1998 Director: Michael Bay Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer Screenplay: Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams Starring Cast: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Steve Buscemi.
After GODZILLA disappointed, both critically and commercially, and DEEP IMPACT turned out not to be an action movie in the strict sense, July of 1998 has rolled around without an action blockbuster having hit the theaters. Expectations have accordingly been high for ARMAGEDDON, in which a team of roughnecks led by Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) are sent into outer space for the purpose of drilling a hole inside an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and then blowing it up from the inside. It certainly seems to have all the right ingredients: it has Bruce Willis in the lead, it has a premise ripe with potential for big explosions and stunts (along with a bit of flag-waving), and the producer/director team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay had been responsible for the 1996 action hit THE ROCK.
Unfortunately, that's really about all it has. Don't misunderstand: ARMAGEDDON entertains. But aside from the few real moments of heroism at the end, I liked it mostly for the same reasons that Beavis and Butt-head would probably like it: because a lot of stuff got blown up, and that was cool. Since its plot (Our Heroes vs. Big Inanimate Object) is about as thin as they come, it has to keep moving mostly on the basis of Murphy's Law: a fuel tank explodes during an intermediate stop at a space station, one of the two shuttles is damaged by debris from the asteroid, the nuclear bomb intended to destroy the asteroid is about to go off early, the drills keep breaking, a character comes down with "space dementia," and finally the bomb mechanism is broken and someone has to stay behind and detonate the bomb manually.
I won't waste time pointing out how the storyline is implausible (which it is), since these kinds of movies do not sink or swim with their scientific credibility. I will point out, however, that it's kind of sloppy. The screenplay reportedly passed through the word processors of nine different writers, and it shows in places. There are a few characters introduced towards the beginning, such as a goofy astronomer with a nagging wife and a few New York City tourists who get scared up by a meteor shower, who then disappear with no indication of why they were in the script in the first place. Steve Buscemi's character, Rockhound, apparently got his Ph.D at age 22, yet he later makes an asinine comment about how NASA's proposed flight plan resembles a failed stunt from a Road Runner cartoon that would insult the intelligence of most high school physics students. There's also some hokey dialogue that I would have thought at least one of the nine writers ought to have edited. (Note to whoever was responsible for the scene where the bomb is about to go off: it's fine to write a scene that turns into a surrealistic nightmare, but actually having a character announce "This has turned into a surrealistic nightmare!" doesn't come off too well.)
Characters in these kinds of action movies don't have to be well-developed, but they at least ought to be animated and fun to watch. Aside from Harry Stamper and Rockhound, most of them are pretty bland: the rest of Stamper's squad consist of pretty much stock macho characters. Their tough-guy antics in front of the NASA training team and sarcastic one-liners are mildly amusing, but the only time I really laughed out loud was when Buscemi started trying to replicate a scene from DR. STRANGELOVE. For a movie that barely comes in under the 150-minute mark, some of this seems like dead weight (not to mention that it completely undermines any sense that the world might really be about to end, but I'm not even going to get started on that). There's also a romance between A.J. (Ben Affleck) and Harry's daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) that doesn't add a whole lot to the story.
Director Michael Bay keeps the action going pretty much non-stop for the final half of the movie. While it certainly serves to keep the audience's adrenaline rushing, some of it unfolds in a rather confusing way. I'm still not sure exactly what went wrong on board the space station: all I know was that there were some sparks flying, some incomprehensible shouting from a Russian cosmonaut (Peter Stormare), and then a Narrow Escape and a Big Explosion. There's nothing visually distinct about ARMAGEDDON except for a few surface shots of the asteroid: at one point, the flying rock, the shouting, and the camera-shaking went on for so long that I actually caught myself starting to tune out for about a minute, and that's one thing that shouldn't happen in an action movie.
ARMAGEDDON turns up the action meter in a way few movies often do, but its coherence meter is somewhere near the bottom. It's good entertainment, and it meets the minimum requirements for a summer blockbuster. Still, I'd be surprised if I remember much of it a year from now. Except, of course, that a lot of stuff got blown up. And that was cool.
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