Great Film: Armageddon
My Ultimate Guilty Pleasure- how do you assign a rating to that?
This movie is my ultimate guilty pleasure. It's inane, manipulative,
has hyperactive cutting, a ton of glaring inaccuracies (pointless to
even discuss or debate), and probably 29 other glaring faults. And why
in every dramatic slow-mo emo shot are there 3 helicopters flying in
unison overhead? What's the point of having 3 helicopters flying really
close together? Who cares! It looks cool. If one day I am having a
heartfelt talk with my daughter, I hope there are 3 helicopters flying
overhead to really 'bring it home'.
Despite it all, I still love watching this movie. Anytime it is on TV I
can watch it 'til the end. Bruce Willis does a great job doing his
Bruce Willis 'thing' (be a smart alecky tough guy), and the supporting
cast is really great. Steve Buschemi in particular gets the best lines.
I think it was also conceived by suits in a studio office (no really),
which is I guess another strike against it. Yet only a bunch of suits
could come up with a 'high concept' like this (so high it's almost
bordering on parody.) And only a director like Michael Bay could make
it. He's far more suited to these types of movies, rather than big
historical epics like PEARL HARBOR (which I really, really disliked.)
I read somewhere once that this movie is as close as Hollywood gets to
pure cinema, in that it is basically completely divorced from reality
of any kind. Is that good or bad? I don't know. I do think if you're
going to ditch convention and any semblance to reality, you may as well
go all the way. It's better than having something that is a confused
mess that tries to be different things. There will be no 'it could
really happen!' here.
So after all this, believe it or not I am going to give this movie a
big fat whopping 8. Why? Because IMO it unabashedly succeeds at what it
tries to set out to be, whatever that is. That makes no sense, since I
am basically saying by all logical accounts this movie may actually
suck, yet I am giving it a 8. But hey I loved this movie.
Cast
- Charles 'Chick' Chapple played by Will Patton
- Lev Andropov, Russian Cosmonaut played by Peter Stormare
- Harry S. Stamper played by Bruce Willis
- Dan Truman, NASA Administrator played by Billy Bob Thornton
- A.J. Frost played by Ben Affleck
- Grace Stamper played by Liv Tyler
- Rockhound played by Steve Buscemi
