This was a box-office smash? Frightening...

Rating: Null/10 (23 August 1999)

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
You know, if someone had asked me a week ago what the worst movie I'd seen was, I would have been hard-presed to pick it.
Not now, however.
Basic premise: asteroid heading for Earth. Planet-killer "the size of Texas". Must land on it, drill 800' down and plant a nuke to split it in two to miss the Earth.
Let's first look at the movie as a whole. It is trite. It is rife with cheap cliches. It is rife with stereotypes. It overflows with moronic, annoying characters written and acted by people who seem to think that screaming idiocies at the top of your lungs is funny/entertaining. It is cheap, intelligence-insulting, flag-waving, mindless writing. It is appalling directing, cutting from one scene to another faster than the eye can follow. It is one or two nicely done CGI effects mixed with truckloads of fireballs, smoke and sparks (and a bizarre, strobe-like flashing that seems to be constantly coming thru the cockpit windows in the shuttle -- don't those aliens dip their broad-beams?) In short, it is something like a cross between "Die Hard" and a slew of terrible B-grade 50s sci-fi movies.
Probably the worst thing I found about "Armageddon", however, was the constant, CONSTANT implausibilities throughout the movie. Here is a few...
1) It is considered easier to train 9 oil-rig workers to be astronauts rather than train 9 astronauts to dig a hole.
2) The "Russian Space Station" (as it was only ever called in the movie) carried a heap of liquid oxygen to refuel the shuttle. Lovely. Pity the shuttle also needs a heap of liquid hydrogen as well.
3) With 2 space-shuttles coming in, the "Russian Space Station" starts to ROTATE to "provide gravity to make it easier to refuel" -- not to mention making it an extremely dangerous and almost impossible task to dock two space-shuttles on it! (One wonders if it was to make it easier -- and cheaper -- to film these scenes rather than have the astronauts in zero-G)
4) Whilst sling-shotting around the moon, the astronauts experience 11G of acceleration. Humans black out at around 9-10Gs. But here, of course, Bruce Willis' friends were busy screaming "yeeehaaa!" at the time.
5) When setting down on an object in space, one doesn't send one's shuttle screaming in for a crash landing. One slows down, matches velocity and gently sets down on the surface. Since all the asteroid fragments are moving at more-or-less the same velocity as the asteroid, you don't have the added hazard of screaming thru clouds of fast-moving rocks; you just gently puff your RCS thrusters and drift past. Wouldn't look as spectacular, I guess...
6) When you crash your shuttle onto an airless asteroid, bits of it don't sit on the surface and burn with nice cheerful fires, putting out smoke that gets whipped around by the wind...
7) When you're equipping your space-shuttles, you don't put 9mm handguns in special lockers as standard equipment, and finally...
8) When you design your "asteroid rover" vehicles, why in God's name do you mount whopping great remote-controlled chain-gun turrets on them?????!!!!!
Do yourself a favour. Don't, under any circumstances, waste your time with this movie.
I give it * out of *****, and that's only because of the great CGI shot of Paris getting nuked by a meteorite.
Phil