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Armageddon (1998)
Rate:
3
Viewed:
2/04, 6/24
6/24:
After finishing Deep Impact, I wanted to revisit Armageddon and see how it holds up today.
Well, it's still an all-time bad movie that makes it hard for me to focus on any scene because it's so bombastic, overblown, and
overwhelming with a bunch of cheesy Norman Rockwell bullshit shots of good-natured people. The show is actually better
when things are calm, but that only happens like two percent of the time. The biggest mistake is things going haywire once
the two space shuttles hooked up with the Russian Space Station Mir. It's when I lost interest for good.
Forget logic; it isn't even there. Everything I've seen is simply impossible. According to IMDb, "NASA shows this film during
their management training program. New managers are given the task of trying to spot as many errors as possible. At least 168
have been found." The most accurate outcome is that everybody dies, no matter what. Tons of rocks, especially the big ones,
hitting the space shuttles will be enough to seal the astronauts' fate. Another mistake is having them fly so close to each other.
"The size of Texas"? That will make the asteroid almost 1,000 miles wide which is absolutely huge for a dozen of people, hence
the need for many, many nuclear warheads, not just one. According to the DVD commentary, Ben Affleck asked Michael Bay "why it
was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me
to shut the fuck up, so that was the end of that talk." At least, he tried to make sense out of the absurdity of it all.
The acting is fine. I don't have any complaints about anyone in the cast except for Liv Tyler. She's awful, and I hate her. Some
of the characters aren't shown that much at times. A good example is Chick, who's played by Will Patton, during the drilling
scenes on the asteroid. Billy Bob Thornton does a good job of making the show seemingly credible on one end.
All in all, Deep Impact is a better movie than Armageddon because it's lucid, clear,
and not overdone in spite of the patently simplistic solutions.