A great beginning, then rapidly downhill

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 1998)

ARMAGEDDON starts off like a house afire. After a pretentious prologue narrated by no less than Charlton Heston (but without plugs for the NRA) and showing the configuration of continents umpteen million years ago as being exactly the same as it is now, the movie pops the clutch and goes into high gear.
New York City, the present day. Under the opening titles, a young man rides his bicycle into Manhattan with his strange looking but still cute dog riding in the basket. Once in Manhattan he comes into confilict with a street vendor selling Godzilla figures, which the dog promptly tries to eat. Meanwhile an Asian couple is stuck in traffic, and the woman is complaining to the cab driver that she wants to go shopping.
Without warning huge chunks of rock are streaking from the sky, buildings are exploding, vehicles are bursting into flames, the top of the Chrystler Building is sheared off and falls into the street below, crushing cars and pedestrians unlucky enough to be in its path. A hole is blown in the street and the young man tries to rescue his dog.
People are in motion, things are happening at a breakneck pace, adrenaline is pumping.
And all too soon we cut away and never see these characters or New York City again. Director Michael Bay starts all over again with a new setting (an offshore oil rig) and new characters who are neither fresh nor interesting.
The rig is run by Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis). His awesomely lovely daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) lives with him and a dozen or so men on the isolated rig. Harry is amazed that Grace is deep in a romance with A. J. Frost (Ben Affleck), one of his crew members. And Harry is the hero of this movie, the man whose job it will be to save the planet, but he's too dense to figure that his daughter would get in a situation like this on this rig in the middle of nowhere?
Lord help us all! Would someone go over to the auditorium where DEEP IMPACT is playing and see if they can talk Robert Duvall into coming back with them? Now there's a man who can inspire confidence.
DEEP IMPACT was a very good movie on its own. Compared to what passes for entertainment here, DEEP IMPACT seems more like a latter day CITIZEN KANE.
Really, there's noting wrong with Mr. Willis's performance here. But the script (by a total of ten writers, always a bad sign) doesn't really give him anything to work with. Late show fans will recall the situation with his daughter and Affleck as recycled from John Wayne's THE HELLFIGHTERS.
Pretty soon Willis is in Houston at NASA and the big brass are telling him that he and his crew need to do the whole astronaut training bit in a period of days and then go blow up the asteroid roughly the size of Texas which threatens to crush the world.
So he and his crew go through the training (lots of recycled material from THE DIRTY DOZEN HERE) and finally do blast off. Before they leave Ms. Tyler and Affleck make goo-goo eyes at each other while songs by Aerosmith (featuring Liv's dad, Steve) play on the soundtrack. If this had been directed by John Waters, he could have had some creepy fun with that.
Paris blows up. Singapore blows up. But since we don't know any characters in either city, that's just so much special effects. Oddly enough, it seems as if the killer chunks of rock will not strike anywhere with a population of less than several million people.
There's one special effect worth noting, though. It's a major conceit of this film that if the sun is shining on the U S of A, it's shining everywhere. There's no nonsense about time zones or the earth's rotation or anything like that.
There are two performances of note here. Most amazingly, Steve Buscemi plays one of the drillers. After all those independent films he's made, here he is in a big piece of mainstream crap to get a nice check so that he can go on making quirky independent films. Way to go, Steve. Cash those checks, hold your head up, and walk on.
One of the big cheeses at NASA is played by Billy Bob Thornton. Billy Bob hasn't made many movies like this, and he creates a three-dimensional and interesting character. Since director Michael Bay doesn't seem very intersted in the actors, just the explosions, I guess there wasn't anyone to stop Billy Bob from doing good work. He plays a man who would have been an astronaut were it not for physical limitations, and he's teriffic.
The astronauts blast off and the story grinds to a screeching halt for an interlude on the Russian space station, which blows up very loudly as the astronauts make a hasty exit. Then the astronauts try to plant a big bomb on the asteroid which, for whatever reason, has grass and water on it although there's no atmosphere.
The finale involves self-sacrifice, probably because audiences responded so positively to the same element in DEEP IMPACT. There's a scene that, oddly enough, builds to a point where it actually has emotional impact: if Michael Bay had known that, the scene probably would have been cut.
More stuff blows up.
The surviving astronauts return to Earth, and there's a wedding. Nothing else blows up. Except the audience, when they realize that they've blown $5 or more and a whopping two hours and twenty-four minutes.
With any luck this will be the end of the current cycle of disaster movies. Anyway, I liked them better back in the 1970's when they featured actors whose tv shows had been cancelled but still had some recognition factor.
Parents' note- the PG-13 rating is for some language and sexual innuendo and violence. The violence mainly consists of stuff blowing up, with very little attention to those people who might be caught in the way. And it's very, very loud. The film might be disturbing to children under junior high age.
On a five scale, Pops gives ARMAGEDDON 1.5 skyrockets.