Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre into the realms of excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By Sam Christopher
Rating: ½ out of 5 Stars (I’m still in the Christmas Spirit)
I would rather watch ANYTHING by Ed Wood than sit through this again. A friend loved it, lauded it, and even got me to watch it after I bought him The Criterion Collection DVD of it for Christmas. I always thought The Criterion Collection was supposed to stand for something, that it was reserved for films considered important in their genre. So I watched it. I came, I saw, I threw up. Important? Hell, it’s not even good enough to be entertaining! Unless your idea of entertainment is watching explosion after explosion laced with awful acting and wretched insulin-necessitating sentimentality. All of this in addition to yet another syrupy power ballad served up by Aerosmith, a band that somehow still makes money decades after having outlived its usefulness. And yet… this awful piece of garbage was still nominated for several Oscars (“Best Sound Effects Editing”? There’s actually a category for that?!?) and won the Saturn Award for Best Picture—I’m guessing because no one who voted watched Lost in Space, which was actually a pretty good film. Oddly, it was nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars and Worst Original Song at the Razzies for the same dreaded Aerosmith tune, “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”. There were seven Razzies nominations, by the way, including Worst Picture (I would have voted for it) and Worst Actor for Bruce Willis (who “won”), along with a Worst Couple for Ben Affleck (whose best scene for me will always be when the paint was dumped on him in Dazed and Confused) and Liv Tyler (who I find hard to denigrate after her role in LOTR). The pair didn’t win—somehow—but at least they had the satisfaction of knowing the audience was cringing throughout their film.
What’s the movie about, you ask? It’s about three and a half hours too long! (I know the flick itself isn’t that long but people deserve some consideration for their drive to and from the theater or video store, time in line, etc.) First, there’s the meteor shower—the one that drops rocks on New York and whacks a space shuttle—that comes as herald for the “extinction event” asteroid (you know, kinda like the Silver Surfer comes to Earth before Galactus). This leads the government to call on offshore oil-rigger Bruce Willis to come up with a plan to drill through the surface of the asteroid so they can embed a nuke at the core. See, the plan is to… Are you sure you want to know this? I mean, I look at this the same way I look at seeing that film The Ring—a ghost may not show up and whack you but there are things you just can’t “un-know”. This is kind of like having someone tell you the plot of Supergirl; it’s one of those things you may think you want to know but you’d really be better off without it. Bottom line: Willis is asked to share his expertise and decides that his oil-rig crew should fly to the asteroid. Affleck, who is deemed an unsuitable suitor for Willis’ daughter Liv Tyler, is naturally a part of that crew. I don’t understand the attraction but…
And I don’t understand why Willis had to die in the film. After watching Affleck aboard the space station… the exploding space station… the exploding space station that Affleck is running through… the exploding freakin’ space station that is freakin’ exploding behind Affleck as he runs through the freakin’ thing… I would have thought they could have just had Willis’ character ride to Earth on a portion of the asteroid. You know, a small piece that broke off one of the two halves the bomb split the big asteroid into so that the two halves would go around the Earth (I can’t make this stuff up, folks). I can just see him riding down and landing right at the wedding, yelling, “Yee-Haww!” and “Get yore hands off’n mah daughter!” all the way down. Either that or maybe the aliens from Independence Day could have given him a lift on their way to Second-Rate SFX Extravaganza Oblivion. Seriously, though, other than increasing the incidence of diabetic coma among movie-goers already on a sugar high, what was the point of killing off Willis? And not Affleck? I mean, I look at Affleck the way I look at Drew Barrymore: any time either of these two get whacked it’s worth seeing (I watched and rewound, watched and rewound, Barrymore’s death scene in Scream I don’t know how many times). Beyond that, frankly, by the end of this picture I was kind of hoping for Earth’s destruction as well. Anything to end the film. And I do mean anything.
I won’t slam Michael Bay too much here because the man does have talent. Unfortunately, it’s mainly for directing bombast and f/x extravaganzas with no depth of either character or plot. The films make money, though, and that’s really all that matters to the people that back him. I have friends that swear by the Transformers films. I won’t watch them—mainly because I generally find myself swearing AT the screen at some point in his films. With Armageddon that started about two minutes in and virtually never stopped until the Blessed Final Credits rolled.
