Don't insult our intelligence, Hollywood!

Rating: 1/10 (5 January 1999)

I'll be the first to admit two things, firstly that I am very critical of movies and second that I am a cynical person. I owe the first attribute to the fact that I've seen a lot of movies. And one reason that I'm cynical is movies like Armageddon. I hated this movie more than even "Howard the Duck," "Surf Ninjas," or "Dracula: Dead and Loving It." Why hate this movie? First of all, in a summer that featured masterpieces like "The Truman Show" and "Saving Private Ryan" plus good movies like "There's Something About Mary," "54," and "Deep Impact," this piece of trash was the top-grossing movie. (By the way, "Deep Impact" was a surprisingly good movie.) Second of all, it's rehash. I'm getting extremely tired of these disaster movies. This is the third "...there's an asteroid/comet heading towards earth!" movie released in the last two years. Aside from movies like "Asteroid" and "Deep Impact," there have been similar theme movies as well. There was "Volcano," "Dante's Peak," and yes, I would even count "Titanic" as the same genre. Third, we come to the movie itself. For lack of a better word, "garbage" is the best description I can think of. It has a sappy Hollywood romance to appease the female viewers while at the same time, it has an equally stupid and unbelievable action part to keep the male viewers from being too bored. In this aspect, it is much like "Titanic," although at least "Titanic" made some semblance of an attempt at a realistic presentation of the action sequences. "Armageddon" was boring, unrealistic, and unoriginal while at the same time showing some of the most pathetic acting skills I've ever seen making it the absolute lowest of the low in my book. Hollywood knows just which buttons to push to create a movie that supposedly everyone will like while keeping the brain work to a minimum. It is a sad but true fact. On a scale of 1-10, this movie gets a 1, and it was lucky to earn that.