ARMAGEDDON Directed by Michael Bay A case could probably be made that Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson are the two men most responsible for the sorry state of the American movie blockbuster. Why was "Godzilla" so godawful? Why did "Speed 2" crash and burn last year? Why did 99 percent of the people who saw it despise "Batman & Robin"? It all goes back to a little movie called "Flashdance." Back in 1983, then-fledgling producers Simpson and Bruckheimer took what was essentially a wisp of an idea -- blue-collar girl dreams of becoming a ballerina -- gussied it up with eye-scorching visuals, set it to a pulsating soundtrack, chopped it together to look like the longest, sexiest MTV clip ever and made a film that became an overnight phenomenon. Cashing in on the rah-rah jingoism of the Reagan era, the duo put together fighter jets, Tom Cruise and a handful of power-ballads and created "Top Gun," a sort of "Flashdance Goes To War." The immense success of these pictures did not go unnoticed by the rest of the film industry, and soon the prevailing attitude in Hollywood seemed to be, "Who cares about characters, plot or dialogue? Just make it look really hot!". Though Simpson and Bruckheimer's magic formula finally lost its fizzle when Cruise's "Days of Thunder" (jokingly referred to by many as "Top Car") quickly ran out of gas at the box-office in 1990, by then the damage was already done: Years of seeing films that emphasized style over substance had shaped the minds and tastes of a new generation of would-be filmmakers who have devoutly followed The Gospel According To Simpson And Bruckheimer. These are the folks who churn out movies like "Batman & Robin," "Speed 2" and "Godzilla," expensive packages that look sensational but are really just concepts in search of development. Michael Bay is one such young director. Trained in the arena of music videos, where no shot can last more than three seconds and chaos is something to achieve rather than avoid, Bay proved in his first features "Bad Boys" and "The Rock" that even though he can't actually tell a story, he can make whatever's going on look plenty exciting. Shoot the people we should admire from low angles, go into slow-motion every time something important is about to take place, make sure everybody sweats picturesquely, and you're halfway home. Bay's hyperactive style gets a workout in the Bruckheimer-produced "Armageddon," a breathless and utterly brainless the-sky-is-falling epic that's so cold and contrived it makes the similarly themed and much more sentimental "Deep Impact" look like "Schindler's List" by comparison. What matters most to Bay and the "Armageddon" screenwriters is destruction instead of drama and pyrotechnics, not people. Its almost total incoherence makes "Armageddon" a kind of breakthrough: This may be the first movie that's actually just a 150-minute trailer for itself. The special effects are generally impressive, particularly an opening attack on New York by a swarm of blazing meteorites and an otherworldly storm in the last half-hour. In between those exciting segments is a plot any seven-year-old could spot the holes in, yet "Armageddon" wears its stupidity as a badge of honor, like the loud-mouthed class moron who tries to make intelligent classmates feel ashamed of their good grades. It can't be a coincidence that every character in the movie with a college education turns out to be ineffectual or prissy and that the burden of saving the world falls on the brawny shoulders of a bunch of hard-livin' roughnecks who don't let silly things like rules and regulations hold them back. Perhaps the biggest shock in "Armageddon" comes when these former oil drillers submit their list of demands to be met in exchange for going into space to stop the Texas-size asteroid that's about to terminate all life on Earth: Although they ask never to have to pay taxes again and to get all their parking tickets fixed, the boys forget to insist the "Porky's" trilogy be brought along as the in-flight entertainment. The leader of the mission is maverick drilling legend Harry S. Stamper, played by Bruce Willis as a man with all the imagination and passion of a metronome. For some reason, as Willis' paychecks have grown substantially larger over the years, his performances have become less and less interesting. Look back at a "Moonlighting" repeat or the original "Die Hard" and you'll see an actor who wanted to entertain people. Look at "Armageddon" and you'll see a self-satisfied star waiting to be adored. Stamper has a twentysomething daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) who's secretly wrinkling the sheets with Stamper's protege A.J. (Ben Affleck). When Stamper first learns of the couple's afternoon delights, he responds by grabbing a shotgun and chasing A.J. all over an oil rig, blasting away recklessly while "black gold" rains down on one and all. This scene occurs about ten minutes into "Armageddon," and offers a preview of the documentary-style realism to come in the next two hours and 20 minutes. Almost immediately after this lighthearted escapade, Stamper and Grace are seized by government agents and whisked off to Washington, where NASA honcho Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) begs Stamper to help destroy the killer rock that's hurtling toward our planet at 22,000 miles per hour. "Not a soul on Earth can hide from it," Truman warns, although lines such as this may cause the audience to wonder if he's referring to the asteroid or Disney's insanely expensive worldwide marketing campaign for "Armageddon." >From this point on, you can probably put together the rest of the movie yourself. Just cut your I.Q. in half and remember to spice up your confused action sequences with rollicking comic interludes of the sort generally not found outside straight-to-video "Ernest" flicks. Halfway through "Armageddon" a goofy, English-mangling Cosmonaut (Peter Stormare) turns up to do an extended hommage to that oft-ignored quipmaster Yakov Smirnoff. To quote another former space traveller, "Oh, the pain, the pain!". Affleck, sporting distractingly bright new caps on his teeth that are hardly in keeping with his character's hard-scrabble past, generally looks lost amidst the fireworks. Tyler's portrayal shows once and for all she's the Daryl Hannah of the '90s, a beautiful face with no personality and in dire need of a strong director to bring out her potential. Hannah lucked out in such films as "Roxanne" and "Steel Magnolias"; Tyler was perfectly fine in "That Thing You Do" and "Stealing Beauty." But Bay isn't the kind of director who cares about performances anyhow: As long as you can shout your dialogue over the ruckus in the background, you're O.K. in his book. Though Thornton lends a certain gravity to a colorless part, the only actor who really enlivens "Armageddon" is Steve Buscemi, whose frequent zingers are so much sharper than anything else in the script -- most of "Armageddon"'s dialogue consists of variations on "I've got to inform the President," "Suck it up," and the ever-popular "Go! Go! Go!" -- it would not be a shock to discover they were ad-libbed. The only other moments of humor in this turgid experience come from the filmmakers' attempts to visualize life in the American Midwest, which they see as a place somewhere between "The Waltons" and "The Grapes of Wrath," with ancient trucks, antique radios, Moms in cotton housedresses and young'uns cavorting in rickety homemade go-carts they might well have borrowed from The Little Rascals. What a wonderful world it would be if "Armageddon" opened at the local picture show and all the real-life Midwesterners stayed home to listen to Buck Rogers radio dramas and read Flash Gordon comics instead. James Sanford
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