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Bruce Willis leads a group of Big Damn Heroes in Michael Bay's abysmal Armageddon |
Armageddon is the ultimate expression of Michael
Bay’s style. With the camera swooping and rotating wildly around characters on
the move, the fast-editing, the assault on the ears, the green-yellow-blue hue,
every shot and line of dialogue in Armageddon feels like it was made to
be inserted into a trailer. It’s an overlong onslaught (nearly two and a half
hours) which rarely goes ten minutes without a sequence that features
explosions, furious shouting and frantic camera movements. Most of the action
in Armageddon is incoherent and the film rather neatly replicates the
experience of being actually hit by a meteor.
For many people this is a guilty pleasure. But there is very
little pleasure to be had here. By trying so hard to top Deep Impact – a
film he hadn’t even seen at this point – Bay dials everything beyond 11. So
much so it becomes exhausting. Half the action sequences (of which there are
many) are impossible to understand, such is the fast editing and the way all
the dialogue is screamed by the actors at each other, all at once, drowned out
by bangs and crashes. The only dialogue you can actually make out in the film is
of the “The United States government asked us to save the world. Anybody wanna
say no?” variety, built for slotting into a trailer before some more bangs.
In fact the whole film is basically a massive trailer for
itself. It’s unrelenting and after a while not a lot of fun. I guess if you
catch it in the right mood it might just work. Bay gives it everything he has
in his arsenal. But even he can’t overcome performances from his actors that
range from bored and unengaged (Willis and Buscemi both fall into this
category) to over-played grasping at epic-status (Affleck and Tyler fall into
this one). Billy Bob Thornton comes out best with a wry shrug, knowing the
whole film is bonkers but going with the ride.
Anyway, it all charges about a great deal, even while it never knows when to stop. In every situation one crisis is never enough – it’s best to have three at once. Not only does someone need to stay behind, but the asteroid is breaking up and the shuttle won’t take off! What a to-do! The film is desperate to excite you, like a 7 year old who wants to share the BEST-THING-EVER with you and doesn’t draw breath while telling you every single detail.
Of course, scientifically the film is nonsense, but that
hardly matters. How NASA can know the comet being blown in two will create two
bits that will miss the Earth (rather than two impacts or a whole load of
debris) is unclear. Timeline wise – particularly early on – the film makes no
sense. But then who goes to Bay looking for a science lecture? It even opens
with a ponderous Charlton Heston voiceover, all part of the straining for
grandeur.
It's not even the best Bay film (that would surely be the far more enjoyable but equally overblown The Rock closely followed by the first Transformers film, the only one that doesn't make you feel soiled after watching it). Armageddon could be a guilty pleasure. But really it’s terrible. You should just feel guilty.
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