These days, it’s easy to dismiss Michael Bay as some kind of hack movie director who at best makes crowd-pleasing movies involving things exploding. It’s easy to forget that Bay’s signature style–no movie looks quite like a Bay movie–was once new for audiences and something of a novelty. People liked what he did, and he alone could do it. Sometimes it even worked for the movie in question. As such, maybe his best movie was 1998’s Armageddon.
I don’t know why I submit to watching Bay movies every so often, but I saw the first hour of this one once years ago, so I might as well see how the rest of it went.
After some portentous narration from Charleton Heston (who else?), we rather quickly jump to the main plot: a planet-killer asteroid the size of Texas is headed for the Earth, and NASA has only 18 days to train a crew, send them into space, drill open the crust, drop a nuke inside, get the heck out of there, and then blow the space rock into two separate pieces that will pass the Earth on either side. Sounds easy when you put it that way. But as NASA director Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thorton) learns, the drilling part may be harder than he thought.
Enter Harry S. Stamper (Bruce Willis, carrying the other half of the 33rd president’s name). He designed the drill, and he can fix it since NASA keeps breaking it. He’ll even go into space to save the world on one condition: he brings his usual crew of roughnecks instead of the astronauts NASA had recruited. Sure, training roughnecks to be astronauts is probably harder than training astronauts how to drill (something apparently even Ben Affleck asked about on-set), but this is still a Michael Bay movie. Don’t think too hard about it.
Stamper’s crew is made up of the usual assortment of oddballs, character actors, and one handsome guy with a chip on his shoulder (Affleck) who happens to be dating the boss’s daughter (Liv Tyler). The clock is ticking, so can these misfits get their acts together long enough to save the world?
It struck me as I watched this that even though many of Bay’s signature moves–fetishistic use of military hardware, a dramatic speech at a key moment from an authority figure, kinetic camera movement, and actors far too qualified for these sorts of movies being in the movie all the same–it did somehow feel…fresher. I wouldn’t say it was good, per se, but the last minute bobbling of the detonator to blow up the nukes and save the world actually felt tense. I knew the Earth was going to be saved, but it still worked. It could be that this was the movie, Bay’s third after The Rock and Bad Boys, established those Bay-isms that are so familiar right now, or it could be this movie came out while Bruce Willis still seemed to be trying to act when he appeared on camera.
True, the characters are still rather thin, but the ones that do have distinct personalities and aren’t just stock characters do so because of the actors playing them. Affleck and Tyler may be any pair of young lovers with Willis as the overprotective dad, but when you take actors like Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, William Fichtner, Thorton, and the late Michael Clarke Duncan, they’ll find something to put a distinctive signature onto. The best may have been Peter Stormare as a Russian cosmonaut that the group picked up en route to the asteroid. He actually seems to have a personality as written, and Stormare makes the guy eccentric enough to stick out amongst a crew of oddballs, weirdos, and the generic cockiness of Affleck’s A.J. All things being equal, Bay has always been able to draw on great casts even when he doesn’t give them much of interest to actually work with.
Armageddon may be the quintessential Bay movie, and probably his best work. I wouldn’t call it good, even as a popcorn flick, but it sure isn’t boring.
Grade: C+
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