Armageddon

This is IT, America. This is your summer movie.

It is really impossible to criticize a movie when, after the movie has ended and you have viewed much of the credits to try and calm down, you are still in a general daze, one of the kind that comes from caring about absolutely nothing but what is on a gigantic screen directly in front of you and what is coming out of enormous speakers to the sides of you. There are things to be said both for and against this movie, but I cannot argue with the end result. This feeling of sheer vicarious exhiliration, and the type of exhaustion that can only come when you have sat perfectly still leaning forward in your seat paying rapt attention for a good 45 minutes...these are what you go to the Big Blockbuster Summer Movies for. "Godzilla" wanted this feeling, but only had it when the lizard himself was onscreen. "Deep Impact" shunned this, and now it has fallen into the sea like some sort of, I don't know, wayward comet or something.

There hasn't really been something like this since "ID4," and although the two films are utterly different in the methods they use to achieve the feeling of exhiliration, the basic storylines are the same: something from outer space smashes up a few cities, including New York, NY (this time, we also have an utterly fake Shanghai, straight from a 1940s Charlie Chan movie set, and—yes, frog haters!—Paris, France, with a gargoyle from Notre-Dame stolidly watching it all until he too is asteroided into oblivion), then we get a crazy and scientifically dubious technological scheme together and get some people to deliver it at great peril to themselves. Michael Bay has, in this film, taken the art of the "flash-cut" and the moving camera to new heights, by never turning them off. Even meetings (in those dark, blue-lit, vaguely military meeting rooms from "The Rock" that Bay loves so well) are covered this way, with stationary humans moving around in the camera's lens. During the sections of the movie that deal with human beings, this can get a little confusing. Cameras moving to the right of them! Cameras moving to the left of them! Cameras behind...who? Who is that? Did we change scenes?

Fortunately, the last half of the movie is not concerned with people but with big machines and a big rock. (And to all those people who suddenly seem to have come out of the woodwork with malice in their hearts towards computer-generated imagery, I say to you: If you can tell me from your personal experience that the surface of an asteroid the size of Texas as it hurtles towards Earth does not look like that, I will watch "Boys on the Side" and "The First Wives' Club" instead of "Lethal Weapon 4" next Friday.) This was "Deep Impact"'s deep problem, I have decided. It's not so much that I didn't want to see Tea Leoni, although that is certainly still a deep and abiding desire in me. I am not interested in no damn HUMANS. I am interested in emotions so big and simple they can stand up to big, complicated machines and big, destructive forces of astronomy. This movie certainly has those. The action is huge, the machinery is the pride of America, the emotions are simple and so strong that they are occasionally expressed with gunfire. This is how I like my summer films.

The only thing really wrong with this movie from an enjoyability standpoint is its total maleness. Not just in its complete exclusion of people without Y chromosomes from anything much to do (Liv Tyler's role could just as easily have been played by a mannequin), but in jokes like when the astronomer who discovers the asteroid says he wants to name the asteroid after his wife, "a life-sucking, soulless bitch." Or when we are supposed to be cheering Steve Buscemi's decision to, the night before he is supposed to be saving us all, take out a $100,000 loan from a loan shark and acquire the company of about 10 strippers, including one who we learn later is named "Mindy Mountains." Or the many, many phallic jokes about nuclear weapons and deep-core drilling (you take the point on this one, I assume). It's cringeworthy stuff.

But still, when I came out of the movie theater, I wasn't thinking about that at all. I was wondering how I was going to manage to walk to the Metro station. I was amazed at how I had never noticed my behind's discomfort through this movie's largely unnecessary 2 1/2 hour length. I was battered, I was tossed around, I was thrilled, I was taken someplace in the emotional universe I could never go in my normal, everyday, type-for-8-hours and write-for-the-rest existence.

And how in the hell are you going to argue with that?

Attractive Man Count: 3, at a guess.

Attractive Woman Count: 3 are onscreen for any length of time.

Overall Grade: A. Summer has arrived, and it's time to get into theaters.

Action Movies Home

Spam-O-Matic Home