Top Issue 1-2024

13 August 1998 Edition

Resize: A A A Print

Cinema: Armageddon

See it for the spectacle

Armageddon, the asteroid disaster movie starring Bruce Willis that challenges Godzilla for this summer's big budget blockbuster title, is actually very watchable. The plot is pretty straightforward. A rock the size of Texas is about to destroy the Earth, preceded by lots of little asteroids so we get some good explosions and set the scene. The only way this big rock can be diverted is if NASA sends a team into space to land on the asteroid, drill a hole, and blow it up from the inside.

The suits and uniforms are forced, therefore, to call upon a team of offbeat and crude oil rig drilling experts, led, you've guessed it, by Bruce Willis.

The movie's strengths are in its special effects, which are pretty amazing, and the presence of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, who provide welcome comic relief as sex maniac oil driller and eccentric cosmonaut, respectively.

Willis does not have too much to do bar look heroic, but Billy Bob Thornton is excellent as NASA's executive director.

On the minus side, the movie fails to build up sufficient suspense. We never really believe that the world is about to end, and if we do, we don't feel connected enough to care. The love story between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler is as pathetic and wooden as this viewer has ever seen, and the movie generally fails in its attempt to show the human relationships caught up in the impending disaster.

So it ain't no classic and will not challenge for any of the major acting awards in next year's Oscars, but as action/adventure hokum, Armageddon looks like the bundles of money that were spent on it and there are bangs and flashes aplenty.

By Martin Spain


An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland