July 2–9, 1998

movie shorts

Armageddon

by Sam Adams

Watching Armageddon is like being present as Frankenstein's monster first sprang to life, or witnessing the first atom bomb detonation. There's no doubting the enormity of the achievement, but somehow it seems to leave the future darker, not brighter than before.

Like the mad doctor's monster, sewn together from pieces of ransacked corpses, Armageddon is both old and new; the pieces are visible, and the stitches surely show, but the whole isn't like anything you've seen before, exactly. Director Michael Bay, like his cinematographer John Schwartzman, comes out of a background in commercials and music video. His two previous features, Bad Boys and The Rock, showed a flair for striking, trailer-ready shots, but also showed that Bay hadn't quite mastered the art of putting one shot next to another—in other words, making a movie.

Armageddon is another matter entirely. It's not exactly a masterpiece of subtlety, but it has one thing that most clubfooted, clodpated action pictures (especially of the Jerry Bruckheimer variety) lack: velocity. From its opening moments, in which meteorites lay waste to a space shuttle, the Chrysler building and most of midtown Manhattan, the film moves with the speed (and subtlety) of a brakeless tractor trailer. When it comes to building from sequence to sequence, Bay is still hopelessly inept, but on a minute-to-minute level, he knows how to push the buttons that make the audience dance. TV commercials traditionally build up to what they call the "money shot," the perfectly composed, glistening revelation of the product on display. Armageddon is two and a half hours of nothing but money shots, a seamless canvas of plastic reality where everyone and everything has already been bought. (It's The Dirty Dozen meets QVC.) There have certainly been better movies, but there's never been one that looked bigger.

Bruce Willis, with his big jaw and grizzled cheeks, plays Harry Stamper, the head of a gang of oil-drilling "roughnecks" who are enlisted to save the world from imminent destruction, courtesy of an oncoming comet. Apparently throwing nukes at the thing won't do the trick, so as in Deep Impact, a group of true-blue marauders are dispatched to blow the comet up from the inside, landing on the surface, drilling holes, and dropping bombs into them. But where the Deep Impact gang had a leisurely two years to prepare themselves, the Armageddon crew have only a measly two weeks to conceive, plan and execute before the big rock goes bang. With no time to train NASA's colorless crewcuts in the finer points of deep core drilling, Harry insists on bringing along his motley crew, and that's where the fun begins.

There are a number of "introduce the crew" sequences, where the individual members are picked up at character-defining locations (a craps table, a Midwestern plain, a strip club) and later grilled by a frown-faced NASA psychiatrist (Udo Kier) in a room lined with comically long foam spikes. But ultimately the only actors who succeed in distinguishing themselves from the undifferentiated mass are those who come in with pre-formed personas: Steve Buscemi with his weasely, unstable charisma, and Owen Wilson, with his self-deprecating seriousness. As for the rest, well let's just say that since the film ends with a memorial service for the fallen, it's a good thing they put up pictures, because otherwise you'd never know who they were talking about.

There's a romance angle, too, of course, between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, Harry Stamper's impetuous protégé and his headstrong daughter, but since about all they seem to have in common is matching cheekbones, their story doesn't lend much fire to the film. (They bring to mind that happy, vacant couple in Annie Hall: "I'm shallow and superficial," one tells Woody. "And so am I," says the other.)

Promotional materials for the film positively crow that nearly a dozen screenwriters worked on the project (including such highly regarded names as Paul Attanasio and Robert Towne). The result is of course a hodgepodge, consistent in the way that pudding is consistent, but with large chunks that could seemingly have been dropped out with almost no effect on the overall story. A mid-film sequence in which twin shuttles refuel at a Russian space station seems particularly extraneous, a protracted engagement with no real purpose except to ensure that the movie never goes more than 10 minutes without something blowing up.

By the time our intrepid band finally does arrive on the threatening rock, Bay has opened the throttle so much that there's little to do except watch chunks of rock and ice fly by as our heroes attempt to do their planet-saving work. You can tell they're getting closer to their goal because the film keeps getting longer, but any semblance of coherent storytelling has been abandoned. People are screaming a lot, so evidently there's some kind of danger, but you'd be hard-pressed to figure out what exactly everyone's so excited about. Without the subtlety or skill to vary the way he puts an action sequence together, all Bay can do is keep turning up the volume on each successive scene, and the knob hits 11 long before Armageddon reaches its preordained climax.