What a gigantic crock! Er...rock...

Rating: 2/10 (22 February 1999)

In terms of value for budget dollars spent, "Armageddon" is the worst movie ever made. The movie has nothing to say about anything; it is purely an exercise in eye candy. It is a piece of product without feeling plugged into the machine of feature film distribution. It is cold and cynical, believing that all the audience wants to see is physics. Judging from the box office, maybe the powers-that-be that green-lighted this project were right. But what about the movie? The acting ranges from passable (Willis) to gut-wrenchingly awful (Affleck). A mannequin named Liv Tyler plays The Beautiful Girl with all the verve and passion of a piece of shrubbery. The story goes that this movie was green-lighted and put into pre-production without even a script; it would be hard to argue after viewing the results. There are many great screenwriters out there that can't get work, and then here comes this barely-even-written film to add insult to injury. I had heard that living legend Robert Towne (Academy Award winner for "Chinatown") ghost wrote dialogue for a scene or two in this film; imagine how the movie would have been if he had been hired to actually write the SCRIPT instead of just doctoring dialogue. The movie plays with all the depth of a Levi's or Pepsi ad; it looks like a music video for the movie "Armageddon". Only on a purely visual level does "Armageddon" work at all, and even then it is heavy-handed and obvious, with shots screaming out "look how cool this is!", subtle as a sledgehammer. Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and their ilk have perpetrated yet another abomination on the cinema; as if "The Rock", "Con Air", etc...weren't bad enough, now we have this piece of space debris. At least product like this keeps the studios going so that worthwhile movies can be still be made.