I'm nauseated

Rating: Null/10 (13 May 1999)

Not by Michael Bay's music-video style of shooting film (although that makes me queasy at times), but by how people excuse away sloppiness and audience pandering. "Hey, it's a popcorn movie, get over it." or "Check your brain at the door, and just enjoy Armageddon." Sentiments such as these allow filmmakers to spend a hundred million bucks to make films that are mediocre at best. The less demanding audiences get, the less effort they will put into making a film more than just an empty piece of eye-candy. Armageddon is full of bad space science, but beside that particular brand of pickiness, it has a silly plot, generally bad acting, and inexplicable behavior by the characters. From a science point of view, the spaceships fly like fighter jets, gravity exists where it shouldn't, astronauts completely mishandle volatile fuel (I know they are just "oil drillers" but no space agency would ALLOW such stupid procedures in the first place), and nuclear weapons are given much more power than they actually have. Here is a fact: If an object the size of Texas were heading toward us, with the few weeks' warning the characters had, there would be NOTHING we could do about it. Even with two year's warning via early detection, our current technology and methods would be of no use. I wasn't looking for Howard's End when I saw this movie. But I want something more than glossy tripe. And we all should want that, too.