90's Regret Watch: Armageddon (1998)

this @#$%ing pile of *&^%

Watched:  11/16/2024

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Michael Bay

I write this post from beyond the grave.  

I'm not sure what it was that, specifically, convinced my soul to abandon my body during Armageddon (1998).  There were so, so many options - from Ben Affleck leading the cast in singing "Leaving on a Jet Plane" to Bruce Willis shooting up a functioning oil rig with a shotgun to Liv Tyler disrupting everything in NASA Mission Command screaming about her "daddy".  Or maybe just the premise of the film altogether.  But with 30 extremely loud and stupid minutes left to go, I realized I had passed on to the blogging platform in the sky.

This movie is essentially the redneck fever dream of people furious at other people who paid attention in school or watch PBS because that shit ain't cool.  Michael Bay and Bruckheimer are convinced only nerds care how things work and what the movie needs to do is think of funny and rad things to show - but are neither funny nor that rad.

I'm not averse to anything about the movie on paper.  A ragtag crew is called in to save the world and blow up an asteroid aimed at Earth.  Sure.  Why not?  The actors lined up are *good* to *great*.  So the challenges arrive in every writing, directing, editing and other creative decision that went into the film. 

It's a bedtime story for people who fantasize about how they'd personally be able to save the world with their maybe underappreciated skillset.  It loves the idea of the US as rock, flag and eagle while holding it's institutions in contempt - including the Executive Branch and military, I guess.  And NASA for being so stupid as to think that Astronauts would make the best Astronauts.  It does like the military for parades, though (as seen in the Blue Angels just happen to fucking be there to do the missing man formation within minutes of our heroes' return).

It works on country-song logic about daddies being overprotective of their little girls, and never giving up being the same as being good at something.  Insanely sexist and kind of gross about it - this is Michael Bay, so all of the women look like models, and all the men are gritty and manly or quirky and weird.  Also, when the expert woman is doing something you think is wrong, you pick her up and throw her across the room and then hit the panel with a club - and that works.  You can also seduce them with animal crackers like you're talking to a child.

Ie:  this is the movie that may have led us directly to 2024.

Clocks tick, but come to a screeching stop for people to dick around for a joke shaped scene or to deliver speeches aimed at people who would consider themselves "Real Americans" based on the number and size of flags that they own.  And this movie is very much about things like giant flags and helicopters in shots for absolutely no reason.  Americana pulled from a 1970's lemonade ad.  

It's a movie that basically pitches that Earth is stationary in space, asteroids are clusters moving through space in waves, moving both forward and backward simultaneously, and send warning shots a month in advance?  The only people who can solve our problems are the ones who do their work with elbow grease - everyone else is just an uppity egg-head.  It thinks that when people leave a rig for their weeks off a drilling platform, they scatter across a continent, not live in a metropolitan area on the coast.  It thinks the physics of launching two shuttles side-by-side is fiiiiiine.  Or that if the ISS explodes next to a shuttle, it's not a problem.

What's funny is that *all* of these problems are fixable to get a not stupid movie, but, apparently, fuck that, man!

It has very good FX until they go into space, at which point it looks like 1998.  But the FX also suggest that all meteors are flammable and filled with gasoline.  But this is Michael Bay, so you may have long action sequences during which you can't see what's happening because the screen is too dark, you have no concept of what you're looking at or why.  People yell.  There are no characters to speak of except for Steve Buscemi's horn dog psychopath.  

The pacing of the movie is absolutely deadly and marks the high point of 90's action bloat.  Once we've added so many characters, now they have to have something to do - and that may be a completely pointless 8 minute sequence about jumping a space canyon.  Or giving Steve Buscemi "space dementia".  Or a dozen other events in the movie that just pile up as ideas that kind of go nowhere.

I'd avoided this movie since 1998.  But I figured after making Jamie watch Monkey Man and Kissin' Cousins back to back, I owed her a big, dumb action action movie.  And mostly it reminded me how weird Hollywood got in the 1990's as indie-style films got pretty good and studio films got bigger, louder and more horrible, leading to the Michael Bay era of bloat - which led directly to 00's era of IP married to bloat that was the Transformers franchise.

What's insane is how clearly expensive Armageddon is, and that the one thing that was pretty cheap to do - make it not stupid - was never in the cards.  But I am a stupider person for having had watched this stupid fucking movie.

It's worth noting that you can finally get an idea where Zack Snyder was coming from in his take on things.  I mean, I knew he hadn't come up with his weird, saturated Americana shit on his own.  Here it was, in living, dripping color.

Anyway, I look forward to maybe reclaiming my body eventually.