Armageddon Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT cablehouse DOT dyn DOT ml DOT org)July 16th, 1998
Armageddon
* 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
(C) 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
ARMAGEDDON is a one-hundred-and-fifty-minute migraine headache. It classifies less as a form of entertainment than as a new kind of corporal punishment. It's so meat-headedly macho it should come with its own brand of deodorant.
People have chided me for being so put off by this movie. I know, I know; they're trying to achieve a heroic level of proportions with their characters and their material. Fine, it's over-the-top, but it's still a crummy movie: loud, clichéd, dramatically uninteresting, and just plain painful to sit through. Here is a movie that employed NINE writers, who collectively didn't even add up to one good one. Maybe they should have improvised?
After an opening scene where the planet gets peppered with cosmic hail (which somehow manage to unerringly obliterate nothing but national monuments and a satellite), NASA specialist Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) gets the facts together: an asteroid -- or a comet, even the movie's promotional material seemed confused about that part -- the size of Texas is headed for Earth. To save the planet, Truman eventually decides to recruit a deep-core drilling team to plant a nuke in the heart of the asteroid/comet/whatever and blow it to pieces. The head of the team, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) gets yanked off his rig while chasing around one of his co-workers, A.J. (Ben Affleck) with a pump-action shotgun. See, A.J. was sleeping with his daughter (Liv Tyler), and, see, Dad's still real protective of her despite the fact she's grown up, and are you squirming in your chair yet?
I mentioned macho. Not just in the script, either (since Liv Tyler is one of the two, maybe three women in the movie who get any dialogue at all). EVERYTHING in this movie comes accompanied with gut-rupturing sub-bass audio effects. At one point we get treated to a closeup of a DIGITAL READOUT, and each "tick" of the clock is "realized" on the soundtrack with the sound of a thousand car doors slamming. Idiotic. There's more slow motion in this film than in a *dozen* John Woo movies. Helicopters, police cruisers, spaceships, and human figures are perpetually stamped out against a setting sun. Every outdoor shot is steeped in golds and yellows. It's like a goddamn Marlboro ad on mescaline. (And oh yeah, there's a cheap shot at Godzilla they probably threw in at the last possible second.)
It gets worse. Michael Bay has taken all of this and clipped it together with an editing style so nervous and unsettled that we don't look at anything for more than three seconds at a time. After a few minutes, I remembered that the original cut had clocked in at something like over three hours (God help us all), and that the frantic, first-here-now-there editing may have been less a strategy than a salvage job, a way to pull an even more bloated and unwieldy whole into something vaguely resembling a digestible product. It doesn't work.
Thornton is the best thing in the movie. He plays a character who is interesting to watch and listen to, but most importantly, he keeps a stright face during scenes where the only one keeping a straight face would have been a corpse. Tyler plays the movie like a good sport, weeping and giggling on cue -- like in a "romantic" scene where Affleck tickles Tyler with animal crackers. Willis does his usual steely-eyed job, which made me all the more nostalgic for his hurt-and-alone performance in 12 MONKEYS. I still insist that no actor, however skilled, can survive lines like "Mom didn't leave you -- she left both of us!"
And then we have the effects. This is, I believe, the third time in a row this year I've seen the Chrysler building trashed. Many of the effects are impressive (albeit moronically conceived and staged), but there are only so many ways you can nuke New York -- or Paris, or Singapore, or the whole of the globe. Also, many of the images are informed by moronic sensibilities -- the material with the space-dock, for instance, or the vast majority of the shuttle flight, which has the ships flitting around like the paper airplaines over Mom's bedspread in a student sci-fi film. Or a space station that takes way too long to blow up. Or an asteroid that conveniently has gravity when the heroes need it and doesn't when they don't. And so on.
John Waters once said he would have loved to do a movie where everything was fake -- grass, trees, flowers, sun, everything. This is that movie. Too bad he didn't direct it.
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