Well I finally get around to reviewing Armageddon after viewing it for the second time. Second, now there’s a record. Usually movies of this type are worth watching only once. Actually this one is too. I watched more or less to pick up any details I might have missed when I saw it the first time so I could write this review.
Does Armageddon draw you in? Sure, any movie that has a storyline about the earth possibly coming to an end in thirteen days has to pull you in at least part of the way. But if it wants to pull you all the way in it has to do a few things other than give you whiz! bang! special effects. They need to give you decent characters and an interesting story.
Characters? Well take Armageddon’s characters. They are more or less recycled from other, better movies. There’s Bruce Willis as the gruff leader of the group. There’s Ben Affleck as the tough young punk. There’s Steve Buscemi as a rather menacing character who seems to be interested in having sex with women half his age (Maybe Bill Clinton saw an advanced screening of this movie). There’s Liv Tyler as Willis’s daughter who mostly stands around looking pretty. The rest of the characters are all ones we have seen before in one way or another. In fact, two of the same actors appeared in the previous years Con Air.
Which brings us to plot. Notice that this movie came from Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of Con Air. I bet Jerry was looking at his calendar one day in early 1998 and realized he hadn’t yet written his annual summer blockbuster. He didn’t have much time to write a real script, so he grabbed the Con Air script and simply rewrote enough parts to fool the viewers with short attention spans. They were the only he fooled however, if he fooled even them.
The story itself is fairly obvious from the movie’s trailers. NASA discovers that an asteroid the size of Texas is headed toward earth (They should at least be grateful it wasn’t the size of Alaska). In twelve days it will crash into earth. NASA decides not to release any information to the public to avoid a panic. This could be understandable, after all, earlier that summer they were bombarded by a stale movie about a giant lizard. In the meantime NASA director Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) calls on Texas oil driller Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) to help them stop the asteroid. Stamper and his team are to land on the asteroid, drill a hole in it and plant a nuclear bomb inside it to blow it up. After making some demands Willis agrees.
The rest of the story from there on is fairly obvious. The team goes through all the training and prepares for the mission. And then the mission itself.
To be fair to Armageddon, the movie is better than Godzilla. But better in this case is only a slight and relative term. Together, both of those movies represent summer blockbusters done badly (Gladiator is an example of a summer blockbuster done well). Armageddon does draw you in. But after the movie is over you realize it is kind of demeaning for Hollywood to assume that all audiences have two minute attention spans.