Blink and you'll miss it

Rating: 2/10 (11 November 2006)

Effectively a remake of the 1978 disaster Meteor, but that film reconstituted through the brain of two overwrought p*ss-artists, namely Jerry Bruckheimer  he who would unleash bangs on us for eternity and his top dollar whore, Michael Bay; not so much a director in the classic sense, more a mechanistic film machine with eyes. In fact if Bay hadn't been seen in public it would be easy enough to believe that his name was a synonym for a directing computer developed by Industrial Light & Magic; programmed to replicate the moves of great helmers like Stanley Kubrick and, er, Paul Anderson but lacking the human capacity for feeling that made those men such warm, intimate filmmakers. But Bay is a man and one with the worst directorial style ever known to 110 years of cinema patrons. His technique, if you're interested, involves substituting movement for drama, music video gloss for decent cinematography, incident for story and ciphers for characters. His co-conspirators, his editor and his composer, give their contractual all to ensuring that every one of his synthetically stylish shots are given at least 2 seconds of screen time and each bang, cant and crane-assisted close-up are accompanied by plenty of plastic pathos.
"I don't want to close my eyes, I don't want to fall asleep" sang Aerosmith's Steve Tyler in the hilariously titled tie-in single "I don't want to miss a thing" but you did, you did and you did. With an average shot length of just 0.4 seconds, your ability to watch Armageddon is a lottery based on your pattern of blinking. This is deliberate so that having only registered about 45 minutes of screen time in a single sitting, an audience would be forced to watch it several times. This is genius of course but that aside, this confected cacophonic jingoistic man meat has all the real entertainment value of a Vegetarian Sunday lunchwith no wine. NASA gets a lot of free advertising in this one but they'd have come off better if they'd released the Challenger Disaster looped, into cinemas.
You can gain some fun from Armageddon though  play the drinking game. Take a shot of something really disgusting every time God is mentioned. You'll be dead about half an hour before the end, meaning you'll miss the climatic funeral scene AND the infamous "he's got space dementia!" line. How's that for two good reasons?