Sole Criterion: The Rock and Armageddon
By Brett Ballard-Beach
September 27, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Rock: DVD Spine #108/Laserdisc #334
Michael Bay’s films are always set in the future, at least a little bit. (Paraphrase of a comment from one of his crew - the production designer on Armageddon I think - that seems to clear up a whole lot of nagging details about Bay’s oeuvre.)
I just tell them to put “insert chase scene here” and we’ll figure it out later. (Paraphrase of a quote by Bay, on his collaboration with screenwriters, that covers most of the details the first quote didn’t cover.)
If nothing else, Armageddon gave the rock band Aerosmith their first and only #1 hit (by way of composer Diane Warren), “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, a full 25 years after they had charted their first hit “Dream On” in 1973. It capped the decade-long commercial comeback that began with the album Permanent Vacation, and in some indirect way I am sure, led to Steven Tyler being on American Idol last year. So, thank you (?) Michael Bay.
If nothing else, The Rock gave America its first full-on taste of Nicolas Cage’s tweaked variations on the idea of the late 20th century/early 21st century American cinematic “action hero.” What at the time seemed like an experiment for the Oscar winner, to reap commercial gains from critical glory and infect the mainstream with some off-kilter mania, didn’t quite turn out that way. The experiment is still ongoing and in many direct ways has led to Face/Off… and The Wicker Man and Drive Angry and.. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. So thank you (??), Michael Bay.
Perhaps it’s just general bonkers brought on by the final weeks of ELECTION 2012! in these sometimes not-so-united States of America , but watching Bay speak in an interview from around the time The Rock was filmed - included, as were the thoughts above, as part of the supplemental featurettes on Criterion’s releases of the two films - I couldn’t help but see a beach bum variation on Mitt Romney at age 30, which is about how old Bay was back then, helming what would become his first film to crack the $100 million mark domestically, and which is now simply his seventh highest grosser out of his nine feature films.
It’s partly the looks—I would peg Bay as shaggy but not unattractive circa ’96 - but also because Bay seems to share a similar positive and detrimental attribute with the GOP nominee. Both seem to have unbridled enthusiasm when dealing with areas of personal interest. For Bay, it’s his action scenes, such as his inspiration for the extended freeway chase in The Island and for Romney, the intricacies of asset management and acquisition, dismantling or refurbishing of businesses of all sizes.
In the debit column, I note, and this may be a viewpoint not shared by many others, a complete inability to convey what they are doing in their chosen field. Setting aside all of my other thoughts on Romney, I find it disheartening that he seems to have no discernible fire in his belly as he runs for a position of no little power. I have listened to him speak and in the ill-at-ease tone that seems to creep through interviews and stump speeches and fiery denunciations, I hear a non-verbal ellipsis in reply to the unasked question, “Why do you want to be president?” If he came off as say, blunt, folksy, and slightly batshit like H. Ross Perot 20 years ago (who if I had been 18 at the time, I would have voted for), it would at least give me an indication of what was fueling his quest.
For Bay, the (lack of an) answer comes in his movies themselves. There may be a lot of directors whose work might not suffice to answer the question “Why are you doing this?” (most of Adam Sandler’s directors come to mind), but none of them have such an obviously distinct style that cuts through genres and renders them moot. “A Film by Michael Bay” is the genre for better and for worse (they go hand in hand) much as “A Film by Tony Scott” was. But with Scott, I would feel more equipped to have answered that question, and attempted to in my column a month ago. With Bay, well, an answer is what I hope to find.
Going back to the first paraphrase at top, what is Bay’s collaborator really saying about him? I think he is (unintentionally but helpfully) identifying as what “genre” Bay’s movies might best be described. They’re not sci-fi (although they might be SyFy if not for the $200 million budgets) and they’re not speculative fiction, but with their glitz and their sheen and a steady current of misogyny and a love for phallic symbols and substitutes, they posit a 15 minutes from now where strippers and firearms are go-to plot devices/diversions/a dude’s greatest assets. In films like Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, this makes complete sense. But it takes a certain kind of hubris and gusto to work both those elements into an asteroid-hitting-the-earth movie. This is the kind of combination that can only be articulated in print with certain punctuation.
To wit: Armageddon has deep rig oil driller boss Bruce Willis taking aim at underling Ben Affleck (caught with Willis’ daughter Liv Tyler under the covers) with a shotgun… on an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean! Later, there is a tense gun to the head standoff situation… on a space shuttle in outer space! And last but not least, Steve Buscemi (whose character Rockhound is both brilliant and has an unquenchable thirst for female flesh) suffers a bout of “space dementia” and winds up setting off a military prototype machine gun… on a moving asteroid! And before Willis’ motley crew (including a fresh-faced Owen Wilson, dispatched too soon and given but naught to do) takes flight, their last night on earth consists of… an ill-advised $100,000 loan from the mob and strippers, strippers, strippers as far as the eye can see! Firearms are also heavily prevalent in the science fiction-ish The Island, but in all fairness, it may be a dive bar and not a strip club that clones on the run Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson pop into to seek help from… Steve Buscemi.
What I have found in watching Armageddon (for the first time since July 3, 1998) and The Rock (for the first time in over a decade, although I have seen it about half a dozen times) is how poorly they seem to hold up in some regards. I am tempted to label this the “self-defeating side effects of sensory overload” but since I have apparently become immune to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-a-couple of cuts style of editing on display, the answer may lie elsewhere. I do think Armageddon suffers the worst in a comparison of this week’s pair (it may be the most disposable and least involving blockbuster of the ‘90s), although to be fair there isn’t a scene involving Nicolas Cage playing with animal crackers on Sean Connery’s tummy in The Rock. Many of the action scenes in these two movies are rendered with impressive technical precision and a great reliance on old-fashioned ingenuity coupled with digital magic (the explosion of the streetcar at the climax of the streets of San Francisco chase in The Rock or the annihilation of Paris from the vantage point of a Notre Dame gargoyle in Armageddon) but even these two examples can also serve to illustrate the conundrum at the heart of many of Bay’s films.
They are populated with action sequences that are needless and obligatory and yet are the very foundations of said films. It brought to my mind what might be the Bay Caveat to Roger Ebert’s old Idiot Plot cliché. That of course refers to a film where the plot would be resolved quite quickly if the characters weren’t required to behave like idiots and misunderstand each other or avoid saying the sentence that would clear things up. The Bay Caveat is where a film would be much much shorter if its characters didn’t take such time and effort to blow shit up real good in place of detective work or talking things out. And the running times of Bay’s films bear this out. Tossing out the shortest (Bad Boys at 119 minutes) and the longest (Pearl Harbor at 183 minutes), all the other fall in between two and a quarter and two and a half hours.
Also padding out the time are moments of would-be character development, plot artifice, and endless bantering among the ensemble casts that doesn’t really deliver anything revealing or quote-worthy. These elements ring false because they are what keep interrupting the action instead of the other way around. The payoff for the San Francisco extended mayhem sequence, which begins with Connery’s character fleeing from his hotel suite, is revealed as his attempt to grab a few minutes to talk with the daughter he barely knows (what with being locked up for 30 years and all). While the moment is about as tender and honest as one can find in Bay’s output to date, it is also evidence of his discomfort with these emotions. Gunplay, car chases, and loud explosions are the currency with which his characters communicate. I note that this “private” father/daughter moment is played out in the middle of the public sphere and climaxes with the squeal of two-dozen cop cars coming to a screeching halt in a near circle around the pair.
Similarly in Armageddon, the farewell exchange between Willis and Tyler as he prepares to sacrifice himself to detonate the asteroid and she remains helpless back on Earth is the most genuine moment of sentiment Bay has committed to celluloid. Willis and Tyler are both allowed to be restrained and teary, stoic and fragile, and yet, this moment plays out in the middle of mission control (and if I am not mistaken, at least audio-wise, for the whole planet?) with his forlorn visage peering out from every bank of screens and monitors that NASA could find to spend money on. (On a side note, a 90 second scene in the unrated director’s cut features Willis visiting and saying goodbye to his dying dad, all taut gruffness, and memorably acted by Lawrence Tierney in one of his final roles. It speaks volumes that this tender heart to heart could find no room in the theatrical version.)
From a screenplay standpoint, The Rock is more nuanced in its characterizations than any of Bay’s other films, with a “villain” who is operating from a high(er) moral ground and a fair amount of melancholic rage. A career military man initiates a hostage situation to extort money from the government as compensation for the families of the soldiers who died without recognition under his command. Ed Harris, with the threat of violence in his voice and the reality of sadness and disillusionment in those deep blue eyes, sells the contradiction of a patriot turning terrorist to make a point. As a result, the film has to ramp up a pair from his band of mercenaries to become the real villains (although they are still allowed to die the ridiculously violent deaths that are often accorded to the chief henchmen of the main villain).
Cage and Connery make a great odd couple (or makeshift father/son pairing) and Bay gets significant mileage out of contrasting the latter’s “effortless because it’s second nature” badass persona with the nervous tics of the former, a chemical weapons authority (er, “superfreak”) trying on the persona of a gun toting commando. Hearing Connery in his purring brogue toss off the putdown that “Losers always whine about their best” is more satisfying than any of the insults tossed around in either Bad Boys film. A sequel reuniting the two of them - needless as it may have been - could have been a lot of fun. In retrospect, the closing scene of The Rock now looks like a very prescient set-up for National Treasure.
Armageddon, as with the Bad Boys franchise, suffers from a big black hole (pun intended) where there should be an attention-grabbing bad guy. The chief problem with Armageddon is that the “bad guy” is the asteroid and for all the design that went into creating that massive “rock” in a tricked out soundstage in California, it never comes close to satisfying. Efforts to anthropomorphize it, and supply it with a personality, fail. When the shuttles attempt to land on its surface, and later as the crew struggle to drill down to the core as their time frame goes down to the wire, any sense of the dimensions, the geography, or the alien nature of the terrain is missing. The cheap thrills come from attempting implausible maneuvering through trailing fields of rock debris or dodging flying rock debris down on the asteroid itself. The majority of these moments are focused on the faces of the cast. Many of them look convincingly agitated (in both senses of the word) trembling and shaking in their space uniforms strapped into their seats, but the sound and fury has to do the lion’s share of creating any dynamic tension. This dissipates immediately upon first exposure, leaving nothing for future viewings.
There are two sequences in Armageddon worthy of a little closer discussion (similar moments also appear in Pearl Harbor, and the two would make for a painfully bloated, mawkishly sentimental, but telling double feature on American jingoism and patriotism, and the stories we tell about ourselves.) At about the hour mark and again at the two and a quarter hour point, a sequence of images is used to convey first the apprehension of the world at the start of the mission to blow up the asteroid and then the ebullience once it has succeeded. These may be at the heart of the Michael Bay experience, although it is very likely they were second unit work. These images cut through all the bluster of the film and settle on some primal level, subconscious and subliminal. And yet in contradistinction, they also brazenly announce themselves, like Polaroids from another era that instead of fading retain their vibrancy, creating a dizzying and unnerving effect.
The best way I can describe their visceral effect and impact (in conjuring them up, I can almost feel their psychic weight settling on my shoulders) would be “Norman Rockwell, reinterpreted by Leni Riefenstahl.” In slower-but-not-quite-slow-mo, Bay finds two-second Americana vignettes that seem culled from that particular place that some people seem to be referencing when they talk about “the real America” or “the America that used to be.” In a brick building, people edge out and point towards the sky, all but dwarfed and consumed by the Stars and Stripes in front of the windows (a flag as powerful and frightening as the one that billows in the breeze at the end of Nashville). A boy in motion propels a space shuttle model around the corner of a main street drug store, an empty dusty road unfolding behind him. A child holds a transistor radio to his ear, shielding his eye from the overhead sky, and then gestures confidently and amazedly towards the heavens. There is no violence, no action, no explosions just the calm after the storm as a world dusts itself off, rises from below the frame as the camera tracks to the right, and heads off into the future - but just a little bit - to find a place where strippers and firearms and explosions say all that needs to be said.