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| Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup | | Rating: 3
| You gotta give bonus points to the Touchstone Pictures publicity department for uncommon candor on the subject of big-budget film screenwriting. Press materials for ARMAGEDDON proudly trumpet the fact that the producers "assembled a cadre of talented writers" to polish up Jonathan Hensleigh's script, including Tony Gilroy, Paul Attanasio, Scott Rosenbert and Robert Towne. Even cast members Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare and Owen Wilson were acknowledged for their ad-lib contributions. After creating an additional writing credit to accommodate two more names ("Adaptation" on top of "Story" and "Screenplay," as if you could figure out the difference), Jerry Bruckheimer and Touchstone appear to have publicly embraced the concept of pot-luck screenwriting: the notion that if a dozen different guys all bring something to the table, you end up with a cinematic meal.
Or in the case of ARMAGEDDON, one massive snack. The subject, of course, is this summer's favorite -- a huge celestial body on a collision course with our Big Blue Marble, this one an asteroid the size of Texas. Faced with a "Global Killer" certain to wipe out life as we know it, NASA chief Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) initiates a plan involving landing a shuttle on the asteroid and planting a nuclear warhead 800 feet below its surface. To that end he recruits deep-core oil driller Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) for the job of making the big hole for the big bomb. Naturally, Harry needs his misfit crew along with him, including hot-shot A. J. (Ben Affleck), who coincidentally is in love with Harry's daughter Grace (Liv Tyler), much to Harry's paternal consternation.
It's enough to generate flashbacks from DEEP IMPACT, where the feeble attempts to generate sweeping emotion more often generated sleeping emotion. ARMAGEDDON, to its credit, at least gets its priorities straight. Make no mistake, this is a special effects-driven action film, chock-a-block with ahhh-inspiring scenes -- exploding space shuttles, meteor showers toppling the Empire State Building, the gargoyles on the Notre Dame Cathedral watching as Paris is reduced to baguette crumbs. Director Michael Bay predictably resorts to tension-builders like close shaves with countdown clocks, but at least he knows enough to keep the focus on the drill team's mission once they're in space. For its final 75 minutes, ARMAGEDDON is virtually nothing but explosions, crashes and narrow escapes...and that's a good thing.
It's the _first_ 75 minutes which truly test your gag reflex, as the aforementioned cadre of writers tries vainly to create the illusion of character development. Stock interpersonal conflicts share time with tender moments as all involved make their peace before heading off to save humanity; I'm not sure whether I was more moved by the gruff reconciliation between Grace and Harry, or A. J. wooing Grace using Animal Crackers for foreplay (don't ask). It's all a load of nonsense, made even less interesting by Bay's foolish decision to keep chopping back and forth between the playful introduction of our roughneck protagonists and a solemn war room session at NASA. There's nothing cohesive or compelling about ARMAGEDDON as narrative; strangely enough, it feels like the result of a dozen different writers contributing individual scenes or lines of dialogue.
I'm not going to suggest that ARMAGEDDON isn't a pretty effective diversion. If there's one thing a dozen writers can do, it's produce a bunch of solid laughs and craft a few exciting action sequences. It's fun watching the unhinged performances of Buscemi (as the crew's horny geologist) and his FARGO partner Stormare (as a loopy Cosmonaut), and it's fun grinning at creaky devices like military men being turned into villains for choosing the fate of all humanity over our intrepid heroes. There's just not much more you can expect from a film where they seem more interested in throwing in a GODZILLA gag than in letting one writer create an actual story. For all the uneven visceral enjoyment that it's worth, TOUCHSTONE PICTURES proudly presents ARMAGEDDON: a blockbuster a la carte.
By : Scott Renshaw
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| | Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup | | Rating: 0
| "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it"- Santyana
...Blah, blah, blah. Man, I don't know about you, but I am truly tired of hearing that quote. Not that it isn't true, mind you, but it's invoked way too often and usually in conjunction with denouncing the horrors of the Holocaust, slavery or the South during post-Civil War Reconstruction. What bummers! Personally, I believe the quote's validity can proven with a more contemporary and less grandiose atrocity ...say for instance, Bruce Willis.
Today's history lesson takes us back to 1988- A time when the 'one-man-army' action movie genre looked to be on it's last leg. It seemed that Stallone's and Schwarzenegger's best work was behind them and their movies were vying with each other to see which could most resemble a Tex Avery cartoon. Then, out of nowhere came a little movie named DIE HARD. What set DIE HARD apart from the others wasn't so much how smart the script was, it was the clever twist of the main character: not an ex- Green Beret, ex-mercenary, ex-CIA agent, but just a NY City cop. A regular Joe. One of us. No longer could a building full of hostages only be rescued by an Austrian Superman. It could just as well be an average guy who used his brain and had a rudimentary knowledge of firearms. "Hell, it could've been me!" What made it all even more of a 'goof' was that it was Bruce Willis in the role of John McClane. Balding and not 'matinee idol' handsome but charming in his own simian sort of way. Not really out of shape but not a person who'd choose a protein shake over a beer. In fact, he was already famous for hawking wine coolers and being MOONLIGHTING's David Addison: smart mouthed, blitzed-out party guy. A slacker. A screw up. "Hell, if Bruce could do it I KNOW I could do it!" It was a 'goof' on top of a 'goof'. So what happened? While we all high-fived and celebrated how funny the punchline was we somehow forgot the joke it was attached to. During this bout of amnesia Reality folded in on itself and Bruce Willis became known as a legitimate action hero. He was invited to become a partner in Planet Hollywood and was parodied alongside Schwarzenegger and Stallone on such tv shows as ANIMANIACS and DUCKMAN. Our forgetfulness yielded a condemnation that was quick and severe and in the form of THE LAST BOY SCOUT, LAST MAN STANDING, THE JACKAL, MERCURY RISING and most recently ARMAGEDDON.
In the first five minutes of ARMAGEDDON New York is devastated by a shower of VW-sized meteors. The Powers-That-Be discover that they are actually the by-product of a giant asteroid plummeting toward Earth...with an ETA of 18 days! Since detonating all of the worlds nuclear bombs on the surface of the asteroid would do no more damage than a firecracker held in an open palm (????), the government enlists the aid of Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), the greatest oil drilling 'wildcat' in the world. Harry and his ragtag team of roughnecks blast off into outer space to implant a nuke in the asteroid and save the world. Between numerous mishaps and their own hijinx, though, there may not be enough time.
Double deja vu, huh? Just last year we had two disaster movies about erupting volcanoes (DANTE'S PEAK, VOLCANO) and this year we have two movies about the imminent destruction of Earth by meteors. I figured the obvious thing to do here would be to compare and contrast DEEP IMPACT (a more realistic and sensitive look at the last days of Earth, reminiscent of TESTAMENT and THE DAY AFTER) to ARMAGEDDON (uh...it blows up stuff real good), but I've decided against it .
"...OF ALL THE MOVIES THIS SUMMER, ARMAGEDDON IS THE BEST..." -raves Martin Thomas of The Reel Deal
-Hey, rather than let the studio assign a truncated pre-fab quote to me (like so many other lesser critics who just want to hear their name on tv), I just saved them the work. Of course, what follows "... " would be:
"...AT TYPIFYING EVERYTHING THAT'S GENERALLY INSIPID ABOUT BIG SUMMER MOVIES!"
ARMAGEDDON is a brain dead, suspense-free, artless movie with scribble pad characters, a 'make-it-up-as-we-go' plot, Aerosmith songs every 15 minutes (did I mention that it also stars Liv Tyler), and has a sense of humor that is of, by, and for middle-aged frat boys. Other than bringing in people who like independent movies, Steve Buscemi's and Billy Bob Thorton's only purpose seems to be to share scenes with Bruce Willis and drive home the point of what a rotten actor he is. There's no sense of urgency and you never feel that the world is really going to end...and you don't care! The characters in the movie sure don't seem to. With only two days left to save the Earth they take a night off to go to a strip club. Probably the worst thing about ARMAGEDDON is knowing that it's gonna make more money than God.
ARMAGEDDON is a studio exec's wet dream. It's a combination of TRUE LIES, INDEPENDENCE DAY and CON AIR synthesized in a lab with everything fun, clever or new already extracted. It fits perfectly into it's genealogy of TWISTER-ID4-THE LOST WORLD-SPEED 2-BATMAN & ROBIN-GODZILLA-***. Movies that promise the world then do an insulting bit of 'bait and switch'. Movies we'll sometimes like only because we had our hearts so set on it. It's the history lesson we never seem to learn. 'Santyanna's lament' I call it. I suppose compared to an F-5 tornado that only kills two people, an alien technology that interfaces with a MacIntosh computer, a T-Rex that drinks water from a chlorinated pool rather than a nearby ocean, a Bat-credit card, and a lizard that's as tall as a skyscraper yet small enough to lay eggs in Madison Square Garden, I guess an asteroid the size of Texas not being detected until eighteen days before impact is not all that outrageous. Even when you consider that XF11, the real life mile-wide meteor's brush with Earth has been pinpointed thirty years in advance (Oct. 16 2028 1:30pm). I guess I'm just nitpicking now.
"Dude, it was just meant to be a rollercoaster ride movie and there's something wrong with you if you can't just sit back and enjoy it! You can't compare it to a 'thinking' movie."
So, is this what we've come to? Do I now not compare the cooking of Paul Prudhomme to that of Wolfgang Puck, but rather the taste of a corn-fed cow's dung to that of a slaughterhouse cow? This has all made me question my judgement and put me in a self- reflexive mood. It's not like I haven't loved movies that either require you to check your brain at the door (SPAWN, THE SAINT) or movies where the lead actor can't hold his accent (THE GHOST & THE DARKNESS, THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE) or movies with terrible dialogue (WILD THINGS, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS). I think the key word is EITHER/ OR, as opposed to AND. I guess I require that a movie have SOME merit other than lining the pockets of hack directors and schlock producers (you know who you are). Sure, it's possible to "check your brain" and enjoy ARMAGEDDON, but you may be too embarrassed to ask for it back afterwards. It might have some questions you don't want to answer.
By : Martin Thomas
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