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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.

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