 Armageddon (1998) Armageddon falls neatly into the third category, which explains why I was compelled to rent it, even after the critical flogging it received, and after the traumatic experience that was watching the P.O.S. Deep Impact, from which I have still not yet fully recovered. The plots of Armageddon and Deep Impact are fundamentally similar – a large celestial object (an asteroid here, a comet there) is hurtling toward Earth on a collision course, and upon this collision all life on the planet will cease. The people of Earth then unite in a last-ditch, emergency, desperation, Hail Mary effort to avert the catastrophe, which may or may not work. The ways the mission will be accomplished are not surprisingly similar either – both involve nuclear weapons delivered by landing a spacecraft (or two in this case) on the object's surface. The cast is brimming with stars, as could be expected from a Hollywood summer action flick with an endless budget. Bruce Willis is the oil rig captain, touted as the "best deep-core driller in the world", that is enlisted to lead the mission to blow up the renegade rock. The stunningly beautiful Liv Tyler plays his stunningly beautiful daughter, who happens to work on the very same oil rig. Ben Affleck is the young, rebellious upstart that thinks he knows more than Bruce's character, and also (big shock approaching!) is playing "Hide The Salami" with Liv. Billy Bob Thornton appears as the director of NASA, while Steve Buscemi appears as the resident geologist on the oil rig. The plot is simplistic at best – an asteroid "the size of Texas" is headed directly toward Earth, and we have only eighteen days until impact. Enter the first ridiculous notion of the film. Stop and think for just one moment about just how big something "the size of Texas" is. Well, it's the size of Texas, isn't it? Which just so happens is the largest state in the lower 48 states. 261,914 square miles to be exact. So we can guess that we're looking at a rock that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 MILES WIDE. That's a bit less than the distance from St. Louis to Atlanta. So, what the movie makers would have us believe, is that despite the dozens of huge telescopes on Earth manned with astronomers just waiting to find some object in the sky to affix their name to, a 500 mile wide asteroid on a collision course with the Earth escapes detection until it is only EIGHTEEN DAYS AWAY, and has rained down smaller asteroids ("the size of Volkswagens") on New York? In the immortal words of Bartholomew J. Simpson, "Not bloody likely." Something that large would have been detected years before, possibly twenty or more. Couldn't it have been obscured by a passing quasar or something? Sure, that's ridiculous, too, but at least it would have been a REASON! Another absurd part is the trip the crews take to the Russian space station. Once there, we're hipped to another new fact. If the cosmonaut on board the station causes it to rotate fast enough, gravity will be creayed, so the astronauts can simply walk around the station. To once again quote El Barto, "Woozle-wuzzle?" Now, I'm no physicist, but last time I heard, the amount of gravity an object has is directly related to its MASS, not its rate of rotation. I'm guessing that what they were working on in the principle of centrifugal force holding the astronauts against the deck, but the amount of rotation required to do this would either shake the station apart or induce incapacitating motion sickness. At this point, its hard to tell if the screenwriters were insulting the moviegoers' intelligence, or merely demonstrating their own lack of that particular commodity. But, hell, they're not through yet. The plan once they get landed on the rock (a long shot if there ever was one) is to drill down 800 feet, implant the nuclear device on a fault line in the asteroid, and blow it in half so the two pieces miss Earth. Which is all fine and good, but how the hell do they know there's a fault line there? Do we now have Star Trek-type sensors which can detect this from Earth? Asteroids always form convenient fault lines at 800-foot intervals? Far be it from these hacks to come up with that. Which brings me to another source of disappointment about this one – Paul Attanasio being involved breaks my heart, as he was the head writer on NBC'c Homicide, one of my very favorite shows. I'll spare him, but the rest of these fucks should be flogged with a length of barbed wire, dipped in rubbing alcohol and set on fire. To add to the general evil at work here, the soundtrack is crammed full of recent Aerosmith songs. I could probably go on for days, but I just can't stand the pain anymore. Initially, I didn't think that this was all that bad a movie. I mean, I wasn't expecting The Bridge On The River Kwai to begin with – after all, it was a Hollywood summer blockbuster. Upon watching it, I came away less insulted than I did after watching Deep Impact, which caused me to repeatedly find myself thinking things like, "Ummmm, whatever," the nonsense about the "huge network of caves" being just one such occasion. But in the days following, my opinion plummeted the more I thought about it. Most of Armageddon is so trite and predictable it's pitiful, from the crew of the spacecraft that crashes initially showing up to save the day, to Steve Buscemi getting "space dementia" and going crazy using the drill rig's machine gun (which brings up another ridiculosity – why in the hell does a rig that's going to land on an asteroid need a f'n machine gun?), right down to Bruce Willis staying behind to set off the nuke since its remote detonator is broken. And at least Deep Impact admitted we might not totally pull it off, as at least a mile wide piece of comet got to land in that one. That way, at least we got some nice special effects scenes, like a 1000-foot tidal wave piling into the Eastern seaboard and wiping out Manhattan, Tea Leoni, and the former Lt. Tasha Yar. In Armageddon the best we got was a decent sized rock crashing into Paris. That's it. To be honest, that's the only reason I spent the three bucks to rent this travesty, is for the massive scenes of destruction. That'll teach me. At least they could have shown me millions of Frogs burning alive as the city collapsed around them. Oh well, there's another movie I can make with iMovie and my "Star Wars" figures.
Review by Mario Speedwagon |