*This* was the highest-grossing film of 1998?!?!?

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 1999)

Well, they say that when you watch/read science-fiction, you have to leave your disbelief at the door...but this was ridiculous. Armageddon was one long, continuous, unbelievable scene. In the opener, a meteor falls from the sky, scoring a direct hit on a large Polynesian man, causing an explosion powerful enough to heave cars into the air, but miraculously leaving unscathed the 10-pound, so-ugly-he's-cute dog with which he'd just been fighting, as well as its owner. From that scene, I knew my eyes were in for a painful "oh, you gotta be kidding me" rolling experience. And I never did get past the fact that I was asked to believe that NASA could put together a mission to simultaneously send *two* space shuttles out past the moon to blow up an asteroid "the size of Texas" with one nuclear warhead (okay...they sent two, but only one was expected to be needed and, in the end, actually used) with only 18 days to work with, from the first moment they even realized they had a problem, to the end of the mission. Come on...these are the guys who need a couple of years of planning to send one shuttle into earth orbit! That's why we have four shuttles... so they can be rehearsing three, while one is actually putting on the show.
Maybe I would've enjoyed the movie more if it hadn't been so predictable. But, not once in the entire movie did anything surprise me...from the deaths of the peripheral characters, to the time-worn use of countdowns reaching their final seconds before success is achieved. My God, they even had a "which wire should I cut to defuse the bomb?" scene! I thought we put that to rest in the Lethal Weapon series. This is supposed to create suspense? The group I was with formed a quick pool to guess what the timer would reach when they finally shut the detonator down ("what do you think?...less than a second left? 2.4 seconds? more than 5???"). But was there ever any doubt that they'd defuse it? No...not really.
And I'm not even going to go into the physically-impossible special effects. I'll leave that to the people who went home after the movie and worked out the actual gee-forces that would be involved in the slingshot maneuver around the moon. I'll just say to any director out there...please...just once in a science-fiction movie, don't let a space ship swoop and dive around asteroids, like some high-tech Piper Cub. Space shuttles have wings so they can land, once they return to Earth...other than that, they have no use, because there is no air in space!
Okay...mama always told me, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything. So, on the plus side for Armageddon was Steve Buscemi's comic relief. He actually looked like some schmuck who was pulled off the street and asked "wanna go up into outer space?" and had the time of his life doing it. Liv Tyler was cute as the lone female voice in the Boys' Club. I'm more impressed with her acting every time I see her in a new movie. I hope she gets a shot at some truly dramatic roles someday soon, to see what she can do with them. Bruce Willis played the same character he's played in every other successful movie he's ever done, and he does it well. But, other than those, the other characters were derivative and predictable.
I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. They could've done this as a remake of John Wayne's Hellfighters, saved about a gazillion dollars on useless special effects, and *really* turned a profit. Or...maybe "Hellfighters In Space" was what they were going for in the first place. If so, they tried a little too hard.