"Armageddon" rocks!

Rating: 10/10 (19 June 2004)

Love him or loathe him, you have to give director Michael Bay the thumbs up for the enormous craft and ingenuity that goes into his films. It may be that his films are overblown yet are entertaining, have horrendous yet amusing dialogue, and have wooden yet colorful characters. But you seriously have to ask yourself, what great action movie does not have those qualities? OK, OK, some may not, but we're not talking about other action pictures, we're talking about the films of Michael Bay. Those who say that his films are crap seriously bother me because I have found it extremely difficult to believe that they were not at all entertained when they have paid good money to see his latest action flick.
He obviously likes to blow stuff up (see "Armageddon" or "Pearl Harbor" to see what I mean), but you have to give him the praise that he richly deserves  for that he has an eye for detail, in fact such an eye for detail, that he may just be the best modern action filmmaker alive today. He lavishes in detail and great camera shots of one single frame around a character or object. To make this story short, his films make for captivating, if not necessary viewing for any true action fan. His films are never boring; he keeps dialogue to a minimum and he just keep you entertained for the running time.
Bay was an accomplished music video director before scoring his first hit in 1995 with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in the buddy-cop action film "Bad Boys," and would later re-team with them both for "Bad Boys 2" last year. However it wouldn't be until the following year that people really knew who Michael Bay was when he directed the Alcatraz thriller "The Rock" with Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris as the leads.
Now we're at "Armageddon," which was released amidst hostile reviews and received quite a tongue lashing from critics in the summer of 1998. Its story about an asteroid (dubbed a "global killer" by NASA) and the team of civilian oil drillers who are recruited to land on it and drop a nuke down a hole in its surface took a backseat to some really inventive special effects.
Even if you don't buy the story or its characters, you could at least lavish in the special effects and the production. The antagonist of the film, a jagged, almost hellish goliath of a rock that's hurling towards planet Earth at millions of miles per hour, takes a terrifying life of its own once we see its surface. This is where our director Michael Bay comes in.
He wants to show us his vision of Hell, which is his vision of this asteroid that's intent on wiping out everything on the planet; this also gives the "Armageddon" tagline a little deeper meaning: "It's closer than you think." "Nothing would survive, not even bacteria," so says Billy Bob Thornton after briefing Bruce Willis and company at NASA in one of the films early scenes.
As Jeanine Basinger, a professor of film studies at Wesleyan University, comments in her review of the film on the Criterion Collection DVD (Bay is a former student of hers), "Yes, it [Armageddon] gives audiences a lot to absorb. Yes, it cuts quickly from place to place, person to person, event to event. But it is never boring, and never less than a brilliant mixture of what movies are supposed to do: tell a good story, depict characters through active events, invoke an emotional response, and entertain simply and directly, without pretense."
If you are a die-hard action fan (I'm not, though my movie collection would probably suggest otherwise), don't pass up Michael Bay, because in the end, he's just giving the audience what it wants.
10/10