# Armageddon (1998)

### reviewed by
Andrew Hicks

    ARMAGEDDON
    A film review by Andrew Hicks
    Copyright 1998 Andrew Hicks

    ** (out of four)

If nothing else, ARMAGEDDON will probably go down in history as the loudest movie ever. It applies the mechanics of brain-dead, quick-cutting action movies like CON-AIR and THE ROCK to the disaster movie formula, with mixed results. As far as the summer of 1998 goes, ARMAGGEDON is better than GODZILLA and DEEP IMPACT, but not by much. Movies like these are becoming more about creating hype than living up to it.

Once I saw who would be in ARMAGEDDON, I hoped it would be one of the rare action movies that manages to mix thrills with humor and perhaps even a wee bit of intelligence. This cast is almost all famous for good independent movies, people like Billy Bob Thornton (SLING BLADE), Ben Affleck (CHASING AMY), Liv Tyler (STEALING BEAUTY) and Buscemi (RESERVOIR DOGS and several hundred other Miramax movies).

Then there's Bruce Willis, who's past his prime but still capable of holding an action movie together. ARMAGEDDON is the beginning of the end for Willis, though, because as we all know, once an action hero plays another action hero's father, his days are numbered. (Ask Sean Connery after the third Indiana Jones movie.) He plays a champion oil driller whose rig is stationed somewhere out in the ocean, his military days far behind him. No, he's more concerned now with his daughter's (Tyler) romance with cocksure driller Affleck, as he finds them in bed together and chases Affleck around the boat with a gun.

This is just one of the scenes that make you ask, "Why?" The first comes before the credits begin, when Charlton Heston tells us of the meteor that made the dinosaurs extinct and vows, "It will happen again. The question is when?" A title card then pops up that says, "65 Million Years Later," which is pretty convenient. More credible would be the title card "65 Million, 243 Thousand, 792 Years, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 1 Day, 8 Hours, 23 Minutes and 15 Seconds Later," an exercise would require double the attention span the entire movie allots its audience.

Cut to New York, where a man is walking his dog. The dog attacks an inflatable lizard that a vendor is selling, as the vendor yells, "Hey, leave Godzilla alone." No room for subtlety here, although ARMAGEDDON does kick GODZILLA's ass, if just barely. Meteors rain down on the city, the Chrysler building falls over, much destruction is wrought and two Japanese tourists tell their cab driver, when it's all over, "I want to shop!" Worse than that, this shameful sequence has no bearing on the rest of the movie.

What's next? If you've seen two or more disaster movies, you know. Some amateur scientist has to discover the disaster before the real scientists do. This time it's a crazy old man who happens upon the giant meteor headed for Earth, and insists they name it after his wife, Dottie. "She's a crazy, destructive bitch," he says, and somehow she's flattered. I guess it would take a crazy, destructive bitch to be flattered by having her husband tell the world she's a crazy, destructive bitch.

The government is in a panic but keeps it under wraps, fearing "a breakdown of all social services." I guess when humanity only has two days to live, all it can depend on are its social services. The plan pushed by NASA operative Thornton is to send a mission to space to land on the meteor and drill a hole in it, drop a warhead in there and blow the meteor into two pieces, both of which will miss the earth. It's a brilliant plan and identical to the one in DEEP IMPACT.

The difference is, instead of astronauts, NASA picks Willis to head the mission. I think this is because the writers of ARMAGEDDON realized a crucial fact -- astronauts are boring. Much better to assemble a group of uncouth oil drillers to save the world. It's that same audience- manipulating underdog effect that worked in ID4, and one of the only things ARMAGEDDON really has going for it. The two leads are Willis and Affleck, who don't get along at the right times and then finally start getting along at the wrong time, as is Hollywood custom.

Then there's the rest of the crew, which consists of Buscemi and three people I didn't recognize. These characters exist to crack jokes about the end of the world and, in Buscemi's case, about pedophelia. (When the FBI men come to get him for the mission, he immediately blurts out, "She told me she was 18!") This is the second consecutive Bruckheimer movie that's had Buscemi as some kind of little girl lover, which makes me wonder whose idea that is. If I was Buscemi, I wouldn't be flattered if they called me every time they had a pedo role to fill.

From then on, ARMAGEDDON has what you'd expect -- the training montage, the launch, the refueling at the Mir station, the landing on the meteor, the attempt to drill into it. Each leg of the movie has at least one major thing that goes wrong as the music swells and the cast rushes to solve the problem. And toward the later sequences, at least one casualty per disaster. It gets old fairly fast, which isn't a good thing when your movie is almost three hours long.

Somewhere in there, Paris is destroyed, Affleck proposes to Tyler, four Aerosmith songs appear on the soundtrack and Buscemi goes crazy. Armageddon has some decent scenes of both suspense and destruction, but there's never any question that it will be anything other than a by-the-numbers summer blockbuster.

With each passing year, less effort goes into the writing than the production. The filmmakers instead pay off credible actors (John Cusack and John Malkovich in CON-AIR, for example) from other good movies so you'll think something like, "Oh wow, Thornton, Affleck and Buscemi all in the same movie. It must be good or they wouldn't be in it." I had my hunches before, but it wasn't until ARMAGEDDON that I finally realized you can't trust good actors and special effects to carry a movie.

    --

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