Viking Night: Michael Bay May Phase III - Armageddon
By Bruce Hall
May 17, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I couldn’t agree more.
Maybe that’s standard boilerplate, or maybe it’s telling. If I were the friendly folks at NASA, I’d be down for a summer action film starring Bruce Willis’ perma-smirk against an asteroid the size of Texas. I would probably embrace you like a son when you told me you were making it. Unless you were Michael Bay, in which case I would probably offer to take my own life to stop you. That’s kind of how I feel watching Armageddon, you know? It feels like being tied to a chair while Michael Bay slips his bony hands around your neck and squeezes until your eyes pop out like little skinned grapes.
I saw this movie in theaters the week it released, on a team building trip at work. I don’t really go in for those things because, you know, I’m edgy that way. I also DO love good storytelling, which is why, as you may have overheard someone say recently, I do NOT love Michael Bay. I tell you this so you’ll understand why I didn’t just grin and drool and clap like everyone else when asked what I thought of the movie. I told them I hated it, I still hate it, and it remains near the top of the prestigious Viking Night Most Hated Films of the 1990s.
Rest assured, good reader, that my hatred was reflected back on me a thousand-fold. My co-workers shunned me like a Nazi war criminal. I was a pariah.
Damn you, Michael Bay.
But my hatred of Armageddon isn’t the same seething, angry resentment I hold for the Transformers franchise. This is more of a sad disappointment, like the regret you feel about an ex-lover, or when a lifelong friend betrays you and you must take him down in a climactic battle at the lip of a volcano. Either one is just as bad, is what I’m saying. And it’s all because on paper, this looks like a can't-miss proposition.
Armageddon is a two-and-a-half-hour long action flick, about a rock the size of Texas approaching the earth. The only ones who can save us are Bruce Willis, who is the world’s greatest deep sea oil driller, which is not something I was aware you could be individually good at. And Billy Bob Thornton, as the no-nonsense head of NASA. AND, a merry band of hardasses including Steve Buscemi, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler and Owen Wilson before anybody cared who they were (I’ll let you decide whether you still do).
What in the name of God could possibly go wrong? It’s complicated, but I’ll try to be brief.
As I’ve said, an asteroid the size of Jerry Jones’ ego is coming to kill us, and is three weeks away. Nobody notices this incredibly massive object until advance debris takes out the space shuttle Atlantis and starts destroying national landmarks. The explanation given for this is that NASA’s “finding deadly asteroids” budget is so small, they’ve only mapped three percent of the sky. I don’t think it works quite that literally, but it’s good for a semi amusing chuckle early in the story, when it’s most needed.
With far too little time to come up with a good plan, NASA decides to go with a stupid one. They will hire the world’s snarkiest deep sea oil driller to land a team on the rock, plant a nuclear device, and blow the thing up. Estimated call for the explosion to be a great golden shower of nuclear fire, comparable only to Michael Bay’s own shimmering locks. I’ve always felt that narratively, it wasn’t necessary to make the asteroid so comically large, because any idiot can quickly do the math and see that no, even in a dumb movie like this, that wouldn’t work.
But that’s not the greatest part about this. The greatest part is the “how are they going to get to the asteroid” part. Well, NASA, the agency that minutes ago did not have enough money to see something the size of the Death Star bearing down on the planet, apparently has conveniently been working on a super badass prototype drill for a mission to Mars, and a pair of top secret titanium armored space shuttles just sitting around in storage.
Wait, what? Titanium space shuttles? What does that even mean?
Put a pin in that; we’ll circle back around. More important, this begins the section where I express how confused I am by the things that are supposed to be happening in this movie. We discover that on Stamper’s drill team is AJ Frost (Ben Affleck), and Stamper’s daughter Grace (Liv Tyler). They’re both young, fit and in their twenties - the only such people on the whole crew - and yet Stamper is shocked and enraged when he discovers they’re sleeping together. Grace also calls her father “Harry” instead of Dad, because, you know, she’s edgy like that. The implication is that they’re in some way estranged but no, she follows him around like a puppy up to the point where he leaves.
Their relationship confused me, as did the need to corner a five-year veteran like Frost at the beginning of the movie and educate him on the company’s Not Fucking Harry’s Daughter policy. But as I have mentioned before, Michael Bay characters are not so much fleshed out individuals as they are sets of attributes. Stamper is a Gruff Loner with a Dead Wife, Frost is an Impulsive Hothead, Grace is Suspicious of Dad’s Love but secretly worships him. The rest of Stamper’s crew are essentially a collection of weird personality quirks and unprofessional habits. In fact, when the team is put through the rigors of astronaut training, nobody ever asks the obvious question:
“You keep saying we’re going to land on the asteroid. Land in what?”
This is when Billy Bob Thornton figuratively pulls back a curtain to reveal a brand-new pair of shiny new space shuttles which he offhandedly describes as having “titanium alloy impenetrable skin”. And he says this in the way a real estate agent might assure you that yes, the winters in Saskatchewan are very mild. Nobody stops him to wonder why the invention of an indestructible alloy is not the biggest story in the world, rather than a lazy plot device to compensate for terrible writing?
So, let’s recap what we have here so far. Harry Stamper can smell oil 2000 leagues below the sea, but doesn’t realize that his muscular young protégé has been banging his gorgeous daughter for years. NASA doesn’t have the resources to spot an asteroid a third the size of Europe, but they’ve been prepping a mission to Mars and have been keeping a pair of titanium alloy impenetrable spacecraft in mothballs for...I don’t know...why? Dramatic effect? More budget cuts. Mental retardation?
NASA didn’t have a “plan” for the asteroid so much as they just threw a deus ex machina at the problem. Why, early in the first act, when everyone is running around in circles wondering what to do, did nobody say “Hey, what about those titanium alloy impenetrable space shuttles we built for absolutely no reason a couple of years ago?”. Instead, what we get is a bunch of vaguely scientific sounding prattle about “anomalies” and “flow converters” and “near-earth extinction level events”.
This is actual dialogue from the film. Can anyone tell me what the jolly hell constitutes a “near-earth extinction level event?” Armageddon isn’t an action film; it’s a lazy tenth grader’s idea of what it would be like if John McClane was an astronaut and everything, everywhere was constantly on fire.
Armageddon commits the greatest sin a movie can make in my eyes, which is to abandon its own logic whenever it is convenient to do so. When the Titanium Impenetrable shuttles finally launch, the film is, admittedly, almost nonstop action up until the end. Granted, very little of this involves working on the asteroid - to fill screen time, literally every step of the mission is fraught with screaming, steam bursting out of exposed pipes for no reason, massive explosions and super-fast camera cuts.
The asteroid itself looks more like HR Giger's basement than a celestial body, and of course things do not stop going absurdly, pyrotechnically wrong at this point. Any semblance of logic, drama or story development is abandoned in favor of just...more explosions. And there are so very many explosions in Armageddon; nearly EVERYTHING explodes as soon as Stamper and his team are in the vicinity. It’s as though the entire goddamn universe is made of napalm. Of course, I would never normally take issue with this; explosions delight me more than almost anything.
But I’ll never tolerate it at the complete expense of story. That’s what videogames are for. When I pay good money to see a movie - even a stupid one - I want a STORY.
Sure, there’s a love subplot between Frost and Grace, and Harry is trying to prove to his daughter that he’s not such a bad dad, but all of this is addressed with hasty shorthand. I suppose it doesn’t help that Affleck and Tyler, whom I both like, happen to have zero chemistry together. It’s simply impossible to take Armageddon’s frequent attempts at drama seriously, because the film itself doesn’t believe in it. The story pays lip service to its most important character relationships, but the closest we ever come to building anything is based on Bay’s obsession with all black people being sassy, and grade-school jokes about how much all fat people like to eat donuts.
And can someone please tell me - does Harry Stamper HAVE an accent, or not? I love Bruce Willis, but his pitiful attempts to sound like a Texan make Kevin Costner’s destruction of the King’s English in Prince of Thieves look positively Oscar worthy. Armageddon is technically my least favorite of all Michael Bay’s films, and the only reason it has not been overtaken by the Transformers franchise is because at least THOSE movies feature giant fighting robots. If you’re going to make the stupidest movie in the world, at least have the decency to populate it with giant fighting robots.
NOT Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler making goo-goo eyes at each other while Bruce Willis smirks and the universe explodes into fire around them for no good reason.
So yes, I successfully sat through Armageddon for the second, and hopefully final time. But while I cooperated fully with my obligation to watch the film, do NOT take that as an endorsement of anything that was in it. I could make excuses for Bad Boys. I could make excuses for The Rock.
But goddammit, there IS no excuse for Armageddon.