Armageddon Review
by Curtis Edmonds (blueduck AT hsbr DOT org)July 15th, 1998
by Curtis Edmonds -- [email protected]
What Armageddon has going for it is The Tears. "The Tears" is the chapter in Tom Wolfe's novel The Right Stuff that describes John Glenn's heroic Mercury orbital flight in 1961 and the stunning, overwhelming reception that he received on his return. "That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time," Wolfe writes. "It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America."
The Mercury astronauts, Wolfe writes, were glorious Single-Combat Warriors sent into space, armed only with their holy righteous stuff to fight the good fight of the Cold War in space. In Armageddon, the only Russian menace is a leaky space station. The astronauts of Armageddon have "the wrong stuff": they're a relentlessly eccentric rabble of oil field roughnecks. Instead of the rigorous training that the Mercury Seven received, our nation's newest heroes are given a whirlwind orientation through astronaut school, in what's meant to be a gentle parody of the film version of Wolfe's novel.
But... they are on a Mission. A holy Mission worthy of the True Brotherhood itself! Yes! There is this asteroid or comet -- anyway, this huge big rock -- that is going to smash poor Dayton and Buffalo and Atlanta and the whole comprehensible world all to flinders. And the mission is to stop it, blow it apart so that the halves don't reach earth... and to do that, you have to launch two next-generation shuttles at the same time.. and refuel at the aforementioned space station... and make a sharp hairpin around the moon... and actually land on this heaving, spinning hurtling rock, full of sharp pointy stalactites... and somehow drill a hole through the iron crust of the rock... and take off again before a white-hot nuclear bomb blows the thing apart and... Yes! Save the planet! And the poor, grateful world watching on CNN while eating their popcorn and Junior Mints... well, what can they do but offer up The Tears at this glorious exhibition of the holy righteous stuff?
The problem with Armageddon is this: The sight of Bruce Willis and his oil field Dream Team boarding the space shuttle, risking life and limb on an uncertain outcome, should, in and of itself, be enough to bring on The Tears. Add in the image of the heart-breakingly beautiful Liv Tyler, watching her father (Willis) and her fiancee (Ben Affleck) take off in the heavens, and you've got emotional gold. But for some reason -- and it's the hallmark of the film -- it isn't enough. You've got a perfectly good story here, a perfectly heart-wrenching scene, and it isn't enough for the moviemakers. No, they've got to add in a lot of quick edits of Kodak moments from around the world, they've got to try to blatantly manipulate the audience to bring on The Tears, when the moment was emotionally strong enough to begin with.
The motto of Armageddon is: More is Better -- either that, or the old MTV motto, Too Much Is Never Enough. When deep-core driller Harry S. Stamper (Willis) is authorized to bring his crew aboard the space station, naturally, they're not waiting patiently for him back on the oil rig. No, the FBI has to chase them down with helicopters. It's not enough that the astronauts are in plenty of danger on the asteroid, Armageddon has to engineer a showdown between the roughnecks and the shuttle pilot (William Fichtner, looking for all the world like a young Christopher Walken). All through the movie, the director and screenwriters suffer from a lack of faith in the quality of their story, and try to embellish it needlessly. You get the feeling that if producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay were in charge of Apollo 13, that they'd have Tom Hanks and his crew fighting off ravenous space serpents on the way to the Moon.
The only person in Armageddon who is completely true to the sense of Mission is Bruce Willis. Although Willis is allowed to display some charm and let loose some wisecracks in the early going, once he arrives at the Johnson Space Center, his performance is all business. For some reason, Willis has been trying to put his old happy-go-lucky performances in Moonlighting and Die Hard behind him lately, and that's a shame. Here, Willis is in "deep blue hero" mode the whole way through -- stoic, confident, leadership. He does a good job -- especially in letting his emotional veneer crack at the very end -- but a lot of what makes him a special actor is lost in Armageddon.
Billy Bob Thornton plays the leader of Mission Control, and it's very refreshing to see him be given a normal part for once, after years of playing Southern grotesques. He has the same role here that Morgan Freeman had in Deep Impact: he is there to explain what's going on, and he does a good enough job that it's fair to compare him to America's Finest Actor. Thornton makes up for a lot of the movie's charm deficit, and so does Ben Affleck, who is Willis's primary foil. Affleck, for some reason, reminds me a lot of Adam Sandler -- he's got the same sort of innate goofiness about him -- but he manages to be effective as both the romantic lead and the action sidekick. All Liv Tyler is given to do is hang around Mission Control and look dewy-eyed, and this she accomplishes tremendously. Will Patton redeems himself for his part in the debacle that was The Postman with a strong, sad-eyed performance, and Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi from Fargo team up again to provide much-needed comic relief. (One wonders what the Coen Brothers would have done with this budget and this storyline.)
But setting all of the above aside, the real question about Armageddon is whether it delivers the goods as an action movie. The answer to that question is YES, in big Day-Glo orange letters. Armageddon fulfills your every desire for high-quality special effects and top-notch action. In every male reptile brain, there's a longing for thrills and spills and things that go boom and major monuments getting wrecked, and Armageddon specifically and joyfully caters to that basic hunger. However, you've got to have more than that to make a great movie, and Armageddon is so blatantly manipulative and action oriented that it's hard to put it in that class. But if you can't be great, you can at least be entertaining, and Armageddon is mainstream Hollywood entertainment at its finest.
Rating: A-
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Curtis Edmonds
[email protected]
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