The Michael Bay School Of Film

Rating: 1/10 (13 September 2010)

Armageddon was a cheese ball of a mess. Michael Bay must have worked extremely hard to make sure this movie was about as god-awful as he could get it.
I'll start out with Mr. Bay. The Michael Bay School of Film has three rules: Rule#1: Have stuff go wrong *constantly!* It raises tension and totally never gets annoying or takes away from the storyline! Rule#2: Explosions are good! Put in lots and lots of explosions! Rule#3: Move the camera constantly! Like, every single darn shot! Never ever pause to look at anything or develop a scene! No, we don't have the time for that stuff! A lot of the disaster in this disaster flick was really confusing. The scene where the space shuttle is destroyed and everyone inside it dies was pretty cool, but I had to rewatch that scene twice to see what the heck was going on and who was even in the shuttle.
Now, I won't start bashing the movie for being scientifically inaccurate. I can let a lot of that slide. I'm watching this to be entertained, not taught. Of course, it could at least entertain me. That would be nice. And a lot of the movie had moments where I was going "Okay, no. That's where I draw the line." For instance, they knew 18 days ahead of time that this asteroid was coming? If you know *anything* about astronomy, you know that it's extremely difficult to predict when an asteroid is going to hit the earth. You have a better chance of predicting next year's weather forecast. But what really struck me was that the movie was really predictable. I won't give away the ending, but halfway through the first act, you're probably aware how it's going to end anyway.
As for the screenplay and storyline itself... holy god what a mess. First of all, through the first half hour of the movie I was going "Okay, it'd be nice if you would slow down and take some time to develop some of these characters. Or at least let us learn something about them." And then he did slow down. Way too much. He just decided "Screw it," and didn't take his story *anywhere* for a good half-hour or so.
And then he brutally forces a lot of the emotion in the movie. It's like in those retarded spoof movies where the filmmakers are going "Laugh, darn it!" except Bay is saying "Cry, darn it!" To give it credit, there was the scene with Will Patton and his ex-wife that was actually pretty well done. Of course, the scene barely finishes before we cut away from it (in fact, I'm pretty sure the scene wasn't quite done yet). What does he cut to? A strip club. Thank you for that, movie. I didn't start watching this to see a drama about an asteroid destroying the earth. No, I wanted to see a strip club! Continuing on, the characters were really poorly developed. A good example is Ben Affleck's character. I mean, why am I supposed to care about this guy?? He's obviously incompetent, makes all the wrong choices, and he's kind of a douche bag. He really is just useless. Am I supposed to care about him because he's in love with Liv Tyler? I'm really not sure why she is anyway, except because, as Bruce Willis even says early on in the film, she "doesn't have any other options." This brings me to the acting. God did these actors suck. I really expected a lot out of Willis. I look at Die Hard and Pulp Fiction and I think, "okay, he's going to give a good performance." But, he really doesn't. I mean, for the first act of the movie he has some non-descript accent. And then he loses it as the story progresses. Then there's Liv Tyler. At least now I know where Kristen Stewart learned how to act for the Twilight movies. Tyler's entire performance was based on moping and never ever changing her facial expression. As for Ben Affleck, he sucks. Plain and simple. He was annoying, I hated his character, and he just sucked.
There were a couple of redeeming actors, however. Steve Buscemi actually gave me some entertainment from his on screen persona, and Will Patton seemed to put in some effort and try. I'll give them points for giving decent performances.
Another very redeeming quality from the movie was the music. The soundtrack was awesome. I really just wanted to turn off the picture and just listen to the music. But, alas, I could not.
As for the special effects--the Oscar nominated special effects, no less--they were really cool. But they were also done in a hurry. We'd see about seven seconds of special effects and then the movie would get ADD and start filming stuff falling down somewhere. The cameraman just didn't seem to be able to stick with the scene no matter how hard he tried. Ever.
Frankly, this is one of the worst directed movies I've ever seen. There's hardly anything entertaining about it and the main character seems to be the $4 million explosions rather than Willis, Affleck, or Buscemi. And the characters were extremely hard to keep track of, the action sequences were thrown together haphazardly, and a lot of the logic in the movie was just bulled together. The movie was just bad. Disjointed, campy, incompetent, and bad bad bad.
2/10