ARMAGEDDON
USA. 1998. Director - Michael Bay, Screenplay - Jonathan Hensleigh, Adaption - Tony Gilroy & Shane Salerno, Story - Hensleigh & Robert Roy Pool, Producers - Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer & Gale Ann Hurd, Photography - John Schwartzman, Music - Trevor Rabin, Visual Effects Supervisors - Richard Hoover & Pat McClung, Visual Effects - DreamQuest Images, Additional Visual Effects - Blue Sky/VIFX (Supervisor Richard E. Hollander) & Digital Domain (Supervisor - Erik Nash), Paris Sequence Supervised by Hoyt Yeatman, Digital Effects Supervisor - Darin Hollings, Digital Effects - Cinesite (Supervisor - Carlos Aguello) & Tippett Studio (Supervisor - Bruce Nicholson), Special Effects Supervisor - John Frazier, Production Design - Michael White, Supervising Art Director - Geoff Hubbard. Production Company - Touchstone/Jerry Bruckheimer Pictures/Valhalla Motion Pictures. Bruce Willis (Harry Stamper), Billy Bob Thornton (Dan Truman), Ben Affleck (A.J. Frost), Liv Tyler (Grace Stamper), Steve Buscemi (Rockhound), Will Patton (Charles `Chickie' Chapple), William Fichtner (Colonel Willie Sharp), Ken Hudson Campbell (Max Lennert), Michael Duncan (Jayotis `Bear' Kurleenbear), Peter Stormare (Lev Andropov), Keith David (General Kimsey), Owen Wilson (Oscar Choi), Jason Isaacs (Ronald Quincy), Jessica Steen (Jennifer Watts)
Plot: When an asteroid the size of Texas is discovered nearing Earth, it capable of obliterating all life on the planet if it hits, NASA's only hope to save the world is to recruit a team of hard-headed, anti-authoritarian oil riggers to go up into orbit, land on the asteroid and drill to its core to plant and detonate a nuclear weapon to divert its path.
In the same way 1997 was dominated by twin volcano disaster movies (`Dante's Peak', `Volcano'), so 1998 is dominated by twin astral body collision disaster movies with both `Deep Impact' and `Armageddon' vying for our attentions. Despite the commonality of themes, both are quite different films - `Deep Impact' was a tepid soap opera melodrama about how people meet the end, while `Armageddon' is an out-and-out action film. A likely comparison might be between `Saving Private Ryan' and `The Dirty Dozen' - while both are essentially World War II mission movies they are told with quite opposing emphases.
`Armageddon' comes with an absolute determination to be as BIG as it possibly can. It has a reported budget of $272 million which, if accurate, makes it second only to `Titanic' in size. Perhaps the most amusing thing about the budget is that the film's advertizing campaign was almost as large as the actual production budget of the film itself. One certainly can't deny that it has been effective. One has been bombarded by the film's quite nifty promotional campaign for months - giant digital displays in theatre foyers counting down the days, minutes and seconds until the film's opening; posters featuring the faces of the principal characters plastered around the city - "He's doing it for heroism", "She's doing it for love". If only then there had been a film that had been worth such epical effort. Unlike `Titanic', which contradicted accusations of gross over-spending and turned it around to become the success story of 1997, `Armageddon' emerges as only a spectacular monument to its own self-promotion and self-importance over the provision of anything of substance.
Director Michael Bay's previous films - `Bad Boys' (1995) and `The Rock' (1996) - have been filled with gratuitous action sequences and `Armageddon' represents Bay's excesses at their most extravagantly empty-headed. The film is conceived around the provision of a series of dramatic peaks every ten minutes or so. But all Bay seems capable of doing is substituting rapid editing, explosions, flashing lights, people yelling orders at each other all at once, and a dramatically hyping musical score for any real sense of drama. Each action sequence - the destruction of Mir, the landing, the liftoff, the buggy jump, the meteor shower - is just so brainlessly empty in its absurdly over-hyped dramatic contrivations and so unbelieivable as realistic drama that, contrary to what Bay is hoping to achieve, you just sit allowing all the sound and fury to wash over you without even the remotest sense of connection. The writing is absurdly one-dimensional - Steve Buscemi has no purpose in the film other than to crack wry one-liners and Liv Tyler is there it seems simply because the film needs a female lead. It is hard to believe that the nuclear detonation sequence can with complete seriousness offer up such old hat bomb detonation cliches as people yelling "The red or the blue wire ?" and the digital countdown stopping three seconds before detonation. And despite the presensce of at least three scientific advisors on the credits, the film is scientifically preposterous - in a vacuum space shuttles conduct aerial turns like jet fighters; atmospheric turbulence is encountered on a slingshot around The Moon; gravity is inexplicably on while aboard the asteroid and Mir but off back aboard the shuttles; and there is a really, really ridiculous sequence where people are able to turn an extra-vehicular buggy into a flying vehicle simply by turning its gravitic stabilizers off.
It has been a long time since one has seen a film which so relentlessly celebrates its own brainlessness. It wants to be a film about heroism. Heroism here is represented by Real Men - their sweat, their stubble, their muscular brawn, the handsomeness of their faces is shot in emphatic highlight. It is clear that these are Real Men because they do Real Men things like ride bikes, fast cars and horses, gamble, have tattoos, party in stripper bars and above all never give up on a job. But all the heroism comes absurdly posed. The sweat and the stubble on the heroes all comes like it is shot for some fashion layout. The film wants to convince us of some triumph of working class ordinariness but the sheer everyman quality of its heroes is shot in such a way that it attracts attention to the very artificiality of the attempt to do so.
And what the film ends up celebrating is not so much a sense of heroism as an adolescent anti-authoritism. I would be greatly concerned if the fate of the world rested on a group of roughnecks who, among other things, start firing at each other with shotguns when they are annoyed; someone who keeps protesting "She didn't tell me her age, I swear"; and someone who explains their failure at psychological tests on the grounds they were dumped on their head as a child. Everybody on the opposite side of the coin to the heroes is characterized as double-dealing military or ineffectual because they haven't done any `real' work. In its opening moments the film celebrates a scene where the hero fires golfballs at a circling Greenpeace ship while one of his offsiders asks "What's wrong with drilling for oil ?" While one may not always agree with Greenpeace's methodology, the film's mindless celebration of environmental plundering on the grounds that it is a test of real men's courage and the characterization of protestors as worthy of contempt is something that verges on intolerance. Similarly the film gets a big joke out of putting its heroes in a position when they can give the finger to the government and demand they never pay taxes again - but when you see that all the men seem to do with their money is to blow it gambling and in stripper bars, you are struck less by the film's sense of the triumph of heroic take-no-shit individualism than you are by its sense of macho self-centeredness.
And it doesn't just stop there. It is not merely the mindless machimo of the heroism that sticks in one's craw, it is the mindless patriotism of it too. One cannot remember seeing a film before which featured so many shots of people posing in front of the American flag. Like `Independance Day' before it, this is less a film about combatting a world-threatening menace than it is a triumphal assertion of a belief in American identity and individuality. It is not merely a film about Real Men who never give up on a job going into space to save the world, it is about Real Men going to boldly assert their idea of what America is all about. All the heroic posing comes intercut with weightedly symbolic shots of the American flag and cutaways to the Iwo Jima statue and the plaques commemorating the sacrifices of the Apollo mission. And the background is filled with incredibly sentimentalized and equally posed Norman Rockwell-esque shots of good ordinary folk gathered around haybarns listening to the radio or emerging from churches in slow motion. As a non-American I kind of find the cultural imperialism of it all rather hard to take. Most unbelievable of all is the moment the American President goes on air to announce the launch of the mission and people the world over sit and listen in reverential awe, masses of Indians even sit in front of the Taj Mahal in prayer. Give me a break ! All of this in itself may have been slightly more palatable had not the heroic spirit of American independance that we are being asked to cheer on not been one that is so sophomoric and adolescent.
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