Armageddon (1998)

Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Steve Buscemi, Will Patton, William Fichtner, Peter Stormare, Keith David, Michael Clarke Duncan, Ken Campbell, Jessica Steen, Owen Wilson, Jason Isaacs, Grayson McCouch, Chris Ellis, Clark Brolly. [PG-13]

Noisy, numbing disaster porn on the global scale—an asteroid the size of Texas is on a collision course with Earth, so NASA trains a crew of deep core oil drillers (led by “best in the business”, Harry Stamper, played by Willis) to get launched into space, slingshot around the moon, land on the big hunk of high-speed death, drill several hundred feet down, drop a nuke down the hole, and blast it apart. Sure, whatever…if scientific stupidity were its greatest sin, no biggie, let’s have some fun, but, sadly, fun is just about the only thing not blasted to excess here. A significant majority of this two-and-a-half-hour brain-dead blockbuster is a full-blown sensory assault, perhaps intended to numb the senses which would find plenty to be offended by here—chauvinism, racism (particularly toward Asians and African-Americans in minor roles), jingoism, a lack of general intelligence and basic human decency, etc. The constantly whooshing and circling camerawork combined with machine-gun editing seems intended to leave audiences disoriented to the point of queasiness, and the pummeling sound design is as excruciating as it is inexplicable (you can hear the asteroid growling like an animal on more than one occasion!). Endless montages of foreigners huddled around television sets and heartland corn lifted from rustic 1950s clichés at least give the ear drums a rest, but the screenplay (credited to Jonathan Hensleigh and J. J. Abrams) provides everyone laughably serious or laughably idiotic or laughably romantic or laughlessly comical things to say at every turn, and manufactures too many unnecessary crises—oil rig worker Affleck’s clumsiness leads to the destruction of a Russian space station, Buscemi’s horn-dog geologist becomes afflicted by “space dementia”, and so on. Released only a couple months after a different asteroid disaster epic, Deep Impact, and lemme tell you, Armageddon, I didn’t even like Deep Impact, but you, sir, are no Deep Impact. The grating sonic bombardment accusation can be extended to the noxious Aerosmith power ballad, “Don’t Miss a Thing” (heard in part multiple times during the movie), which was written by Diane Warren, and that’s all I need to say about that.

15/100