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Rating: Null/10 (12 June 1999)

Probably not the worst piece of crud I've ever seen, but absolutely the loudest, and, given the high budget, the dumbest. (I've seen sf pictures costing fifty thousand dollars that were tighter, smarter, better and more convincing.)
This picture is a timeless tribute to sheer idiocy. We laugh at many of the dumber science fiction flicks of the Fifties on Mystery Science Theater 3000, as if somehow we've evolved beyond them, become superior, in the last forty years; but give ARMAGEDDON special effects from 1958, and it would be as absurd as ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN.
We all know that movies sometimes stretch logic in order to accomplish what the writers want; but usually when this happens, it's a last resort, and the picture feels sort of apologetic about it. ARMAGEDDON, however, makes it the only resort. It positively lurches out of its way to turn logic into road kill.
Why is it necessary to show a pointless two-second shot of jet pilots scrambling across a runway, a la TOP GUN? Everybody in the audience knows the country isn't under enemy attack. In general, why is it necessary to see three quick shots of everything, when two longer ones would do as well? As Pauline Kael said about 1941, it's like having your head stuck in a pinball machine for two and a half hours, and it gets damn tiring.
Why is it necessary to have the two space shuttles take off about two hundred feet apart? Wasn't anybody in the movie's version of NASA familiar with the rather large fireball generated by Challenger? Have that happen to one of these ships on liftoff, and there goes the world. And why do the shuttles seem to fly within each other's exhaust wash half the time? Would the movie really have been less exciting if it had been fifty percent smarter and fifty minutes shorter?
I can't buy the argument that we should excuse all the sloppiness here, because it's "only" an action film. Movies like AIR FORCE ONE, CRIMSON TIDE, THE TERMINATOR and STARSHIP TROOPERS prove it's always possible to grip an audience by the throat, without cutting off the air supply to the brain - but first you have to have talent.