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Armageddon Customer Reviews (16 - 18 of 90 Reviews)

BEGAN THE BIG SLIDE FOR MOVIES
1998 was the year when the motion picture industry started its slide into mediocrity. I trace this downward spiral to the movie, Armageddon.
Frankly, if you have seen all Bruce Willis action movies, you have seen them all. It's easy to predict his lines, his reactions, grimmaces, and all other nuances.
Of course, Willis is a good actor when given the chance. Bruce, though has the problem of a lame script given to us by Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay. All their scripts (Con Air, The Rock, etc) have the same plotted formula you get attending a screenplay writing seminar. None of their scripts give us any depth of character, but instead rely on overblown special effects, ridiculous stunts, and Murphy's Law.
Another part was the terribly bad science in this movie. I can give some movies latitude. Star Wars, for example, is a fantasy existing somehwere else. Armageddon, on the other hand exists in today's world where scientific laws exist. A more recent movie, The Core, does the same thing.
Finally, this is the LOUDEST movie ever. True, we are a society addicted to sight and sound, but all the noise becomes so intense that it distracts the audience from the characters and the story (which were both thin as a supermodel).
My cousin told me this movie made him cry at the end. It made me cry, too. I wept because I blew $6 on this movie.

Defending Armageddon
"Armageddon" is about a huge astroid that is hurdling through space and will collide with Earth and destroy all life on the planet. NASA quickly assmebles a team of oil riggers to go to the astroid, drill a hole, set a nuclear bomb in it, and blow it up. As you can imagine, everything that can go wrong dose.

Quickly to say why I liked it, I thought it was funny, action packed, and very touching, like when Willis tells his daughter he has to die so that the world can live. Maybe overly melodramatic, but effective. The actors do a good job, although they are basiclly playing roles they have played their whole careers. The special effects are great, I really thought the effects teams did a good job with the project.

There was a reason that "Armageddon" was not advertised as a thinking man's meditation on the human condition; that's because it was supposed to be a fun action movie about a bunch of lovable losers who are suppoed to go into space and blow up an astroid. I think a lot of people missed the point. It is not "Citizen Kane"! Do not expect it to be deep! It stars Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi, and Billy Bob Thornton; what are you expecting? I realize that scientist were pulling their hair out with the wrong science described in the movie; but so what, it is a movie, not a real NASA training video.

As you can tell, I am a lot more forgiving of this movie than most other people are. I like Michael Bay's films, for the most part, and Jerry Bruckheimer is also attatched to more than a few of my favorite movies. As long as you expect entertainment over substance, than you are in the right frame of mind for their movies (Bruckheimer's "Black Hawk Down" being an exceptional movie action movie and a real thought provoking film on top of that). So quit your complaining and enjoy the film.

Armageddon: Bigger, Not Better
Armageddon is an action movie with serious delusions of grandeur. Michael Bay's blockbuster is a sort of comic book brought to life, an over-stylized apocalyptic spectacle born of a generation raised on music videos--something that is especially evident in sequence after sequence edited to fit with the film's Aerosmith-dominated soundtrack. The pacing is frantic from the first fiery frames. Visual effects are clean but clearly overdone. The cast is bloated, with many of the comic back-ups overshadowing a set of forgettable heroes, and though the script makes great efforts to grant most of the lead characters an emotional moment this only serves to emphasize the cruel disregard offered to the movie's many victims. Those emotional moments almost always seem sentimental or forced, though they're soon lost in a wash of action and disaster. At one point Billy Bob Thornton succinctly promises the asteroid approaching Earth will bring "basically the worst parts of the Bible," and this is what the film goes on to deliver. Suffering greatest of all amidst all of this is the film's credibility. Armageddon is, first and foremost, almost utterly unbelievable. This is a critical flaw that weakens the integrity of the plot from the first scenes set at NASA control. It's rare that any element, from design to dialogue, reinforces the dramatic reality of the situation or its consequences. It's a big movie that tries to be much, much bigger--truly, as apocalyptic epics go, Bay's Armageddon is petty and easily overshadowed. At its best, Armageddon entertains on the basest levels. At its worst, it cheapens a great many potent images and potentially powerful themes with its flashy approach. Unfortunately, it's not difficult to fathom that a movie this expensive could ultimately seem so cheap.

--Brian A. Dixon
Revelation Magazine

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