***SPOILERS***
I was predisposed to hate Armageddon because
of That Song. The movie's theme song, Aerosmith's I Don't Want to Miss a Thing,
I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike Deep Impact, Armageddon is an action movie pure and simple. Deep Impact attempted to combine action with a look at how people would behave if the end were really coming, and ended up doing neither successfully. Too many things were going on in one movie. Armageddon is far more traditional - a raggle-taggle group of men save the world and float off into the sunset in a sea of testosterone.
The plot is pretty basic. An asteroid the size of Texas is heading for the earth: when it hits, life on earth will become extinct. As usual in this sort of movie, only Americans seem to have noticed the asteroid and only America is doing anything about it. NASA determine that the only way to get rid of the asteroid is land on it, drill into it, plant a nuclear bomb in the hole and remote detonate it, blowing the asteroid into smaller pieces which will pass by the earth. So, they need the best long hole driller in the world, which, luckily for them, turns out to be Bruce Willis. Harry Stamper (Bruce) has his own troubles - he's recently discovered that his daughter Gracie (Liv Tyler) is sleeping with one of his drillers, AJ (Ben Affleck). Since he had better things planned for his little girl he is furious, and chases AJ around the rig with a shotgun. Added to this, AJ is a hothead more inclined to listen to his instinct than safety precautions, and Harry loses no time in firing him.
However, when he agrees to undertake this mission for NASA, he insists on bringing his own crew with him rather than the astronauts NASA was intending, and is compelled to rehire AJ, who for all his faults is an excellent driller (and is now engaged to Gracie). This group of misfits goes through rushed basic training, learning how to work drilling rigs in low gravity, and eventually get into space. There the expedition staggers from disaster to disaster, and eventually to get the job done one man must Stay Behind and Die Bravely Saving the Planet.
It's formula. But it's a formula that works in Armageddon. However, there are a *lot* of flaws.
One of the main problems is the way things are forgotten about as soon as they have happened. As the film opens Manhattan is blown apart by a meteor shower. This seems to be merely an excuse for some special effects, since in the next scene everyone has forgotten about it - we don't see any of the furore we would expect. On the night before our heroes are due to go into space they are arrested for brawling, and then show up on the launch pad as normal the next day. Okay, we can guess NASA made a call and they got released, but it would have been nice to have some reference made to this. And despite the asteroid's tiny mass in astronomical terms, it appears to have the same gravity as Earth, except for the few moments that the director suddenly remembers it should have low gravity when our heroes need to jump a broad canyon. Most ridiculous of all, throughout the film we are shown people all over the earth reacting to events simultaneously - in daylight. Yes, apparently when it's daylight in Cape Canaveral it is also daylight in Paris, India, China, the South Seas...clearly NASA has found a way to conquer time zones as well as a mere asteroid. Another scene that annoyed me - one of the many scenes in which plain ol' American folk are seen outside their trailers or out on the prairie, wearing their cotton dresses and staring at the sky in the manner we are familiar with from adverts - was a plain ol' American wandering down a street past a huge election poster for JFK. Okay, we get it, Kennedy, space programme, one small planet, and all that, American values, but *as if* a poster from the 1960s would have survived on a billboard out in the street! And even though for this kind of movie it seems to be par for the course that Americans save the world, I would have thought that since the whole earth is about to be destroyed, it would have been smart for NASA to phone round and see if other countries had figured out asteroid-destruction contingency plans, rather than making all of us depend on them to do the right thing (particularly since we learn the USA's chief scientific advisor has a C- in astrophysics.)
The special effects aren't all that special - the sequence at the beginning showing the destruction of New York is good, but honestly, how many times have we seen the Chrysler building plummet into the streets? There are only so many different ways you can show a yellow cab flip onto its roof and blow up. There is another good sequence with a Russian space station exploding, but nothing new. The asteroid graphics are okay but boring.
However, the acting is fine all round (and who would ever have thought that would be the verdict on a Bruce Willis movie?) Bruce himself is ideal for this film - he is essentially Dying Hard in space. He is good at playing the wisecracking, tough man roles, and stoic, heroic Harry Stamper suits him down to the ground. Liv Tyler doesn't get to do much but look pretty and wobble her lower lip, but this is such a male film a woman character is completely superfluous. In fact, one of the shuttle pilots is a woman, who sits in the copilot's seat during the flight, disappears for the entire middle of the movie, and reappears just in time to endanger all their lives by being useless at electronics when the power goes out. The shuttle is saved when a stray Russian cosmonaut they have picked up physically hurls her out of the way and does the job himself. I don't know why they bothered having any female characters in the film, since their roles were derisory. Ben Affleck isn't exactly stretched by his character, who wavers between being a nice guy and a complete ass - we can understand why Harry takes a shotgun to him earlier in the film. However, Steve Buscemi and Billy Bob Thornton are both very good, even though they're not asked to do anything very difficult. Steve Buscemi does the class-clown thing he is so good at, and he's fun to watch as the sex-mad Rockhound. Billy Bob Thornton brings intelligence and heart to the role of Dan Truman, the NASA Mission Control chief. Like Ed Harris in Apollo 13, he makes his character humane and interesting rather than a handy male authority figure. During the launch sequence we see a brief scene where he is leaning his head against a tiled wall, and in the reflection of his face in the tiles we can see his expression for a moment before he closes his eyes. The scene is very short but we get a feeling of the burden on this man, who has asked other men to take on a hazardous job, and is now responsible for what happens to them while at the same time ultimately powerless, left on the ground while they grapple with problems so many miles away.
The shortness of scenes is another of my problems with this film. The flash-cut, fast editing conveys a sense of excitement and action, but some sequences are cut so fast that it is actually impossible to see what is happening, where anybody is, and - when the men are suited up - who anybody is. It makes a lot of the action scenes confusing.
With all those faults though, I still liked this film. Yes, it's a rubbish movie. But it's a fun rubbish movie. It's a summer film, an enjoyable testosterone-fuelled romp, if you don't take it too seriously. And it has a great debunk-NASA scene: after lots of serious NASA stuff, ominous words and pronouncements of doom, we are at a Mission Control meeting. Billy Bob says in voiceover "Let's keep the laughter to a minimum, please. This is not to scale" and we pan around and see him standing by a dangling beach-ball size Earth, with two huge shuttle models on sticks, zooming them around to demonstrate the flight plan. Now we know how NASA plans missions! I'm sure I wasn't the only person in the audience with a sudden mental image of men in white shirts, black ties and buzz cuts, whirling model spacecraft around and muttering "Houston, the Eagle has landed" in quiet moments...the secret is out, boys 8)
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999