Take Plan 9, add $150M...
One of the most critically-sodomized films of recent years, Armageddon is like a celebration of stupidity and ugliness, and as such, it is without peer. Despite the wealth of clichés dredged up and the fact that the film offers nothing really new, I've never seen anything quite like Armageddon, and I guess maybe there's something special about that. So-awful-it's-fascinating, or maybe just awful, it's taken a year and a half for my curiosity for a second look to finally result in a rental.
Second out of the gate in 1998's space-crap-smacks-into-the-earth bonanza, this movie manages to take 150 minutes to tell the story of a bunch of people trying to dig a hole in a rock. I remember pre-release rumors of early cuts being upwards of three hours. Well, with this many screenwriters (seven that I know of, and rumors of at least three more), I guess you can't expect brevity.
The first thirty seconds or so of this one make clear just what kind of movie we're going to see - we see modern-day Earth, and then we see it get smacked by a big rock while Charlton Heston tells us that this was 65 million years ago. Hmm, strange thing is, Earth didn't look squat like that 65 million years ago. I'll bet if you asked director Michael Bay about this one, he'd say "Well, 65 million years ago, we hadn't discovered continental drift." Hoo-boy; they probably spent a few hundred grand on consultants for this movie, and all of 'em flunked junior high science.
Call this a plot if you will, that's what I'm gonna call it so that I won't have to take up too much space. A rogue comet has sent a giant, Texas-sized asteroid (more on this later) hurtling straight for Earth, where it is not, I repeat NOT planning to stop sixty miles above Los Angeles, turn around and expose the 1000-mile-wide "OBEY YOUR THIRST" billboard on its back. NASA's solution - send some men up there in two space shuttles to land on it, drill a hole, put a nuclear bomb in there and get out in time to watch the fireworks. So what we ultimately get is a motley team of half trained astronauts, half oil-rig roughnecks, who are brought along because their team leader Harry S. Stamper (Bruce Willis) insists that drilling is an art.
Ben Affleck is also along for the ride as Stamper's protégé. One look at the roles Ben picks and those which are snapped up by frequent collaborator Matt Damon should make clear which of the two is burdened by more talent. (I'll give you a hint - only one of these two actors chose to star in Reindeer Games) Let's just say that Affleck gives it his all.
Liv Tyler plays Affleck's snookums (and the daughter of Stamper); promotional banners for the film announced that "She's doing it for love", which is weird, because even before seeing this one I knew she wasn't actually going to be doing anything. (except wait around for her man to come home and make love to her, like all these stupid Bruckheimer-movie chicks) (wait a sec, there is another kind of woman in this movie - that's right, the woman who not-unreasonably asks her neglectful husband if she wears a sign that says "Karl's Slave". The asteroid is named after her because "She's an evil bloodsucking bitch from which there's no escape.") Tyler can't act, never could, and is one more thing for me to hate Aerosmith over.
Steve Buscemi plays one of the drillers, and I've heard that he got his own banner that said "He's doing it for the money". Boy, they ain't kidding - trying to liven up awful Bruckheimer flicks has pretty much become his new specialty. He's occasionally funny (he has a good moment when Tyler angrily laments that he was the one who "showed" her how to use tampons), more often not ("Because I'm a genius!").
Keith David is here as the Wrong guy - the guy whose job is to totally wrong about everything. Will Patton plays one of the drillers, while not helped by lines like "This has turned into some sort of surrealistic nightmare!", he effectively masks pain behind a forced smile when he gets a scene with his ex-wife and estranged son who doesn't know who he is. (he has a restraining order against coming near the kid because "it confuses him", whatever that means. Wow, that man needed a better divorce lawyer.) (actually, I seem to remember hearing that the character was - I swear, I'm not making this up - a convicted but reformed child molester [again, I ain't making this up] but his background was made vague so as to not put anybody off) Everybody else just goofs off for the whole film.
Let's get into this plot. I could go on all day - and since the movie sure did, I reserve the right to wheeze along for just as long.
For starters, let's have a look-see at this here asteroid. Size of Texas, they say. And nobody's noticed it til now. Which is appropriate, I guess, because if you took the ENTIRE asteroid belt, and balled it up into one big moon, it'd be...one very little moon, because even THAT wouldn't be the size of Texas. Okay, seven screenwriters just flunked Astronomy 201. It didn't have to be the size of Texas. It didn't even have to be the size of Pennsylvania. The writers just, apparently, assumed that the audience wouldn't think a reasonable-sized asteroid would be a threat to the world. Well, you know what they say about how you'll never go broke...
Things look up briefly after that stupid intro as we see New York City, already destroyed at least twice that summer in other movies, turned into swiss cheese by a hail or meteors. C'mon, nothing says fun like seeing NYC get the shit pounded out of it (even if we are subjected to the obligatory narrow escape by a dog). What do you think it says about the American psyche that so many of them love to see their national landmarks get blown up? (hey, I'm Canadian. I have an excuse - you can ask this question about Canadians when we see, uh, the CN Tower topple over) (October 2001 addendum - holy shit, I never thought anything would make this movie even harder to watch than it was, but Osama bin Laden and his sidekicks sure found a way, didn't they? Like a lot of people, I'm finding it harder to enjoy watching New York, the World Trade Center, or even just any tall building get the crap pounded out of it in the movies these days. It's cooler than ever to see them stand...but less cool to see them fall. Interesting times, people...interesting times.)
Then things go to shit in an awful hurry. The geniuses at NASA, having discovered this big piece of crap hurtling at us, brainstorm together a bunch of impossibly stupid ideas. I think my favorite is the mylar sail with which to harness solar wind. Yeah, right - to move an asteroid the size of TEXAS?!?!? You know how big this sail would have to be? Geniuses, hell, my rabbit could get a job at NASA if they were hiring people with ideas like that. Sensibly, this plan is given the boot by the head NASA science guy, played by Billy Bob Thornton, the lone voice of dignity in this ridiculous film. Uncanny that a guy named Billy Bob could be the lone voice of dignity in anything, but whether that says more about the film or Billy Bob's ability, I don't know.
Noo-hoo, the plan Billy Bob settles on is to fly the world's best deep-core driller (Stamper) up there, dig a hole 800 feet deep, planet a nuclear bomb in it and cleave the asteroid in twain, both halves of which should miss the earth completely, of course. Okay. 800 feet. IN A TEXAS-SIZED ASTEROID. Does this seem to you to fall within the scope of that "hold the firecracker in your closed fist" analogy mentioned in the film? To keep up that analogy of the asteroid as a closed fist, 800 feet in would be nestled, oh, between your second and third layer of skin, or something. I think the NASA in this movie needs new science guys.
Then we get to meet Stamper and his men, and our first impression of Mr. Stamper is that he is insane. He catches his protégé in the sack with his daughter, and what does he do? That's right - he chases him around an oil rig with a shotgun, shooting everything in sight on this oil rig. Yes, an OIL RIG. Does this man know the meaning of the word KABOOM? A scene like this might work in a slapstick comedy, if done right (and yes, there is an amusing exchange about how Affleck should be able to work with just one leg), but here, it's painful. If we believe for half a second that Stamper means business with that shotgun, then it's hard to take the psycho seriously for the rest of the film. If we don't, then it's even harder because he's just a wanker. (later in the film he tells Affleck that he's always thought of him as a son. Uh-huh.) Then he fires the kid, who sets up his own drilling company (within 48 hours), but don't worry, he'll get re-hired for the asteroid thing.
So of course Stamper insists that he must have his OWN men up there doing the drilling instead of training the astronauts to drill it themselves. Unfamiliar with deep-core drilling as I am, I shan't speculate on whether it'd take more time to train astronauts to drill, or to train drillers to work in space. So I'll accept that these guys would get the training and go up into space with all the training you can cram into a dozen days or so.
Training. The "training" sequence - which encompasses everything from psych profiles to high-G accustomization - is one of the most uncomfortable sequences ever put to film. Oh, not because it's disturbing or anything. Because it's an hour long, it's all filmed Bay-style as an action sequence (even though all everybody's doing is practicing), and the jokes come fast and furious and not one of them works. What a train wreck! You sit there staring that these yahoos - about half of which are referred to somewhere in the film as brilliant, for reasons unknown - goofing off in the lamest ways possible and spectacularly screwing up everything. It's like Police Academy, really (worse yet, Police Academy 3), except you'd think these guys would have a sliver of the understanding that the mission they're being trained for is probably the most important in history. Oh well, at least we get a look at the fattest astronaut ever.
So launch day comes (after a day off for everybody, wherein three of these idiots get arrested, and Tyler and Affleck discuss whether animal crackers are really crackers in a conversation which you just know had its genesis in one of the writers saying "We should do something Tarantino-like here"), and the two shuttles take off without a hitch. Then they must dock at the Russian Space Station to refuel with liquid oxygen (?). The Russian Space Station is repeatedly referred to in every exchange as The Russian Space Station, because after the way they depict it, you know somebody'll get sued if they call it Mir. It's run by one guy (Peter Stormare), very likely drunk, possibly mildly brain-damaged, who's been alone for a year and a half and has not been taking care of the station's 11-year-old components.
Stormare generates artificial gravity by rotating the station, although one look at the station should tell you that it is neither designed to be rotated, nor is rotation really going to do anything. And then, only AFTER this thing is rotating all over the place, do the shuttles dock - seems to me like it'd be a lot easier to dock BEFORE, but what do I know, I didn't flunk out of junior high. Then everybody gets onto the station - this new-found artificial gravity acting in any direction convenient for the shooting of any particular shot, none of it having anything to do with the rotation of anything - to refuel the two shuttles. But then they blow up the station, mostly because of Affleck's incompetence. So the two shuttles go off to the asteroid to do their work.
They land on the asteroid (well, one crashes, but don't worry, Ben Affleck's okay) to do their work, which they do very, very slowly. Wow, this is quite the asteroid - studded with spires and crystal growths everywhere, which all shatter easily and being like ten billion years old you'd think they would have before now. This asteroid has entirely too much personality - a conspicuously evil asteroid that looks less like an asteroid than it does like a big coral reef. Gravity on the asteroid works much like it did on the space shuttle - anywhere between earth standard and zero, depending on what Bay wants from the scene (although the scenes which depict weightlessness are so unconvincing that it's nice to see that Bay seems to realize some of his own shortcomings and avoided further scenes of it). I think it'd be cool if the earth was like that - normal gravity in Denver, and zero-G in, say, Boulder.
Meanwhile, the President wants to detonate that nuke while it's on the surface of the asteroid, even though everybody's briefed him that that will have no effect. So he remote-triggers the countdown, which of course results in the ol' red-wire-blue-wire thing, which the guy who's supposed to know everything about the bomb actually has to think about for a while. This is the only thing this particular character does for the whole movie ? it's his only scene between his introduction, where we're briefly told his name, and his death, which is played out like a tragedy, but I'll be that when one guy sobbed that Gruber was dead, you were wondering who the hell Gruber was. This can be said about a number of characters.
And to top it off, there is of course the last-minute countdown to blowing up the asteroid. I don't want to give too much away, but I don't think I'll be spoiling anything by saying the clock comes down to less than a few seconds when it goes off, the last few seconds before the split halves would still crash into the earth anyway. If you set it off during those last few seconds, and everything goes according to plan...what do you think the odds are that it would split into two perfect halves without big-ass chunks still coming? To say nothing of all those other big pieces we always see floating alongside it. Sigh.
I could go on a lot longer. There are enough continuity errors in this movie to (fill in your cliché, the writers sure did). You've gotta love that one bit with grass (yes, grass) on the asteroid. And there's the ol' Superman IV: The Quest For Peace mistake of there being daylight at all points on the globe at the same time. And while I didn't notice this one on my own, I think it's hilarious that all those Hindus are praying at the very Islamic Taj Mahal. (somewhere, Louis Farrakhan must've been smiling) But I think the weirdest thing has to be the presence of two six-barrel miniguns, one in each shuttle. What exactly was anybody planning to use these for? Were they expecting to find a colony of hostile aliens on this asteroid? And, given the presence of these guns, why is everybody so shocked that one of the NASA guys brought a handgun?
The real kneecapper of this movie, without a doubt, has to be the direction of Michael Bay. An MTV grad whose penchant for quick cuts has always been a little over the top, Bay films this movie like a high-speed flash-card session of random photographs; I picture him yelling "Cut!" before he's done saying which take is being shot. "Take fCUT!!!" Hey, this kind of thing works well for rock videos; I even liked it in Run Lola Run, all 80 minutes of it. But a two-and-a-half-hour movie composed of quick cuts? It's like channel surfing for the same period of time.
The visual effects are mostly quite good, though rather limited ? it's basically all in the form of seeing stuff explode. Buildings, space stations, space shuttles, asteroids...there's nothing this movie wants to show you that it doesn't want to show you getting blown up. That's not all bad - Paris gets blown up, and I'll bet you can't watch that just once. And seeing all those 'roids smack into the moon as the shuttles fly around it was a nice touch. Some of the effects, however, range from the pretty bad (the Russian Space Station blowing up seemed like a last-minute decision) to the awful (ooh, check out that cloud of smoke after the Chrysler Building swan-dives into the pavement).
Trevor Rabin's score is quite good, although everything crashes and burns whenever rock music is applied. I swear, if I hear "The Grange" one more time I'm gonna grab Dusty and Billy by the beards and toss 'em into the spokes of a motorcycle wheel, Happy Birthday To Me -style. And Aerosmith, please God save me from more Aerosmith. I hope this band shrivels up and dies. No, it's not enough that they die - dead musicians tend to be remembered as geniuses, whether they deserve it or not. No, they're going to have to die, but they're going to have to die...in a big elephant-pornography-and-prostitution scandal. It's not enough for them to die, their image must be tainted as well. I hate hate hate this band. I used to be a fan, and while their 1993 show here wasn't what made me give up on 'em, it did indeed first suggest to me that maybe, just maybe, what Aerosmith specializes in is suck. (Pathetic show. Important tip to past-your-prime rock stars - when your concerts are turned down so low people in the crowd can talk to the guy next to them but can't hear the song, you, sir, are past your prime.) Their Oscar-nominated song "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" is prominent throughout, getting increasingly annoying with each appearance. Y'know, I would've liked that song in 1993, it would've clicked with me. I'm so glad I'm no longer such a suck. HATE!!! Canadians Our Lady Peace and Chantal Kreviazuk also appear, but only in the closing credits, with good and bad songs respectively (although to be fair to Chantal, her song here IS just a cover).
Armageddon ultimately took home the most money of any film of 1998, managing to con most people I know (some of them otherwise quite bright and discriminating) into swallowing it whole. Just how this film got away with it, I have no idea, since the same people refused to swallow Godzilla that same summer. Maybe Godzilla needed more American flag-waving. A lot of people look down on this aspect of some recent summer blockbusters, but I love it - I think it's cute. I can see how it would be annoying for Americans, though.
There's never really been another movie like Armageddon, and barring future efforts from Bay himself, I don't see there ever being any again. It's different, I'll give ya that. Just remember: different doesn't always mean good.
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