Cinematic Armageddon

Rating: 1/10 (28 October 2003)

I can't say often enough how bad ARMAGEDDON is. Roger Ebert's review is probably the best ever written about this film: he wrote that it's not a movie but a two hour movie trailer. But ARMAGEDDON is the standard to which every "Big Budget Hollywood Blockbuster" stinker is set against. Personally, ARMAGEDDON is even worse than Roland Emmerich's GODZILLA (98) and that travesty was HORRENDOUS, so you can imagine how bad ARMAGEDDON is. The whole idea of getting guys who work on a oil rig to help astronauts destroy an incoming asteroid is stunningly brainless. Seriously, who greenlighted this project? This "movie" has absolutely nothing. It's probably the most hollow film experience ever put on celluloid. To make things even more enjoyable, it's jaw-droppingly jingoistic, so much so that I wanted the piece of rock to slam into planet earth and kill the whole human race once and for all.
I've never seen so many actors wasted in one single movie. No one gives a semblance of a performance. It's all posing and screaming and in the very embarrassing for everyone concern. The editing is epileptic. The look of the film is like a Budweiser commercial. The science is unacceptably unscientific, even for an escapist movie. Dialogue that made my ears bleed. And the action was silly. The world is about to end and they go party at a strip club where women throw themselves at them. Sure. The space shuttles take forever to land on the asteroid but it only takes them a couple of seconds to leave it. The asteroid pieces always crash into big cities (NY, Paris, Hong Kong...). The never-ending use of slow-motion shots. Machine guns on the rovers. Why?!?! Did they expect to find nasty aliens on the asteroid? Mind-numbingly loud! I can't stress enough how loud ARMAGEDDON is. It's nearly offensive and it takes a lot to offend me. All in all, ARMAGEDDON is the perfect showcase for everything that's wrong with movies these days.