I WANT To Close My Eyes!

Rating: 5/10 (7 September 2003)

Many viewers are befuddled as to why this movie was so popular. There are no characters in this movie, only a motley group of cardboard cutouts. These characters merely serve the plot. I do not care about any of them either, except I was wondering why Liv Tyler would subvert her acting talent in her thankless role.The plot is about saving the world from doom; however, one can not possibly take this movie seriously. It is 2 and a half hours of one climax after another, like one long movie trailer. It overwhelms you, like watching a few hours of explosions in an IMAX theater would, both visually and audibly. If saving the world was really on the line, wouldn't we want the smartest and the most capable people up there? (Remember, the movie opens with Willis, the leader, recklessly wielding a gun; this act is repeated later by another actor yet). This movie did nothing to convince me that Bruce Willis and his boys could do the job to begin with, much less better than anyone else.
The script is full of annoying asides and wisecracks that we expect to find in a Bond movie. Here they're out of place and annoying, if we're supposed to take the seriousness of the threat of the end of the world. Maybe that wasn't the intention. The movie was incredibly formulaic for such a long movie. I was able to predict many of the plot turns long before they occurred because of that. The movie's breakneck pace was off-putting too, racing from one special effects scene to the next. However, the special effects were pretty good I must admit. Many of the musical bridges were annoying; because, they were too loud and muffled the dialog. Some of the songs had little to do with the scene they were used in, like Sweet Emotion for instance. It was one big, dumb, long, loud, empty-headed, extremely shallow music video, like many one finds on MTV. It might have worked better as camp, with Aerosmith playing on the asteroid perhaps. After a promising start, the movie just seemed to fade away and become more routine (formulaic) with each passing minute, despite the intensity of some isolated scenes. After the movie, we are treated to the Aerosmith video of the complete version of the Oscar-nominated song, which lost to When You Believe from Prince Of Egypt. ** of 4 stars.