[Movie Monday] Armageddon: My Litmus Test for Film Advice
My litmus test for suck.
For me, that movie is Armageddon. It came out the summer after I graduated from high school, and I somehow missed seeing it in the theater. But when I saw it on home video later that year on my first Thanksgiving break away from college, holy crap was I annoyed by it.
You might like Armageddon. You might think it’s a good movie. You might even own a copy for a purpose other than irony.
Well, to you I say: that’s fine. But I won’t be taking any movie advice from you until you realize the error of your ways.
Why do I hate Armageddon so much? First of all, I object to the fact that someone got paid to write the script. The very idea of the movie is stupid. I don’t mind the part about the killer asteroid so much, since that could possibly happen, but the idea of sending a demolition crew of misfits up onto the asteroid to destroy it is just offensive to my sensibilities, especially when one of those misfits is Ben Affleck.
First of all, the science in the film is bad. Really bad. I’ve heard that there have been 168 specific scientific inaccuracies pointed out in the film, which means that the writers pretty much just made it all up as they went along. What makes this even worse is that the film occasionally has the pretense of science, which makes things all the more confusing. I’m not going to go into all the scientific problems here, but you can check out Bad Astronomy or Jupiter Scientific if you’d like an idea of what they might be.
Second, let’s talk about the title for a moment. The word “Armageddon” comes from the book of Revelation, and it refers to the place where the final apocalyptic showdown between good and evil is supposed to occur. This is traditionally thought to be the plains of Megiddo and interpreted to mean a big war of some sort. Not only did the writers appropriate a completely inappropriate title, but they also had the gall to say, in the film, that an asteroid heading for Earth somehow was equivalent to a battle between good and evil. Considering that an asteroid is a rock with absolutely no motivation whatsoever, this is a pretty strange conflict to bring up.
Third, let’s touch on all the goofy moments of the film, including the stock storyline (boy meets girl, father doesn’t like boy, boy continues to see girl behind his back, father eventually warms up to boy when he gets to know him, father dies sacrificing himself on an asteroid for dramatic purposes) and the idiotic characters. The people at NASA are portrayed as complete idiots who don’t know much about astronomy or physics. NASA scientists somehow missed that an asteroid the size of Texas (bigger than any other asteroid we know of by a good 150%) until it was days away from the Earth. They blame it on being underfunded.
Fourth, let’s talk about how dopey the film is, with pouty faces and melodrama oozing from every scene. There are callbacks to The Right Stuff and attempts at comedy here and there, but it’s all very inconsistent and very stupid. People die for no good reason, and most of the decisions people make in the film aren’t very good ones. Even the stupid love story could be easily avoided if Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck would just elope already.
Fifth, let’s talk about the music. I don’t mind Aerosmith, but… c’mon. Do we need to crank them up in every other scene? Does this movie exist solely to be simple, noisy and stupid?
Apparently so. And hey, it made $550 million worldwide, so it must have been doing something right. Michael Bay’s previous film, Independence Day, made $816 million worldwide, and it was awful. Spider-Man 3 made $890 million worldwide, and it was almost just as bad. Apparently, there’s something to having a terrible movie positioned to be a summer blockbuster.
But as it pertains to me, if you say you like Armageddon and then start recommending other films, you might as well just stop speaking, because I won’t be listening, even if you say you like The Godfather and Blade Runner and Casablanca, which are all examples of good films that would generally make me think well of you if I knew you liked them. Recommending Armageddon to me is like my own personal litmus test for movie advice; if I detect its presence in your favorites list, I’ll know we can’t watch movies together. But don’t feel too bad, because the films I’ll be watching probably won’t be simple, noisy or stupid, so you probably wouldn’t enjoy them anyhow.
Tags: aerosmith, armageddon, bad movies, ben affleck, bruce willis, independence day, spider-man 3
[Movie Monday] | SeanJJordan | 
January 12, 2009 12:25 am
3 Comments
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By SesAspefcop, January 13, 2009 @ 12:08 am
I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…
By SeanJJordan, January 15, 2009 @ 6:55 am
I’m not sure if you’re a bot or a real person, but either way, I have no idea who or what sukrat is!
By Katie, January 25, 2009 @ 9:50 am
WHY DOES MICHAEL BAY GET TO KEEP ON MAKING MOVIES~~? PEARL HARBOR SUCKED, JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE THAN I MISS YOUUUU
I recently heard that astronomy students? people at NASA? something, one of their assignments is to watch Armageddon and point out all the things that are glaringly wrong with it.