Armageddon (1998)
Budget: $140 Million
Box Office Gross: $553.7 Million
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 39
Number of Explosions: 14
“I don’t know what you people are doing down there. But we got a hole to dig up here.”
The thing I found most interesting about Armageddon was the attention paid to the distance between the characters from each other. The distance between the asteroid and earth. The emotional distance between Grace and her father. The distance between A.J.’s crash-landed shuttle and the other space shuttle manned by Harry. And throughout the film, characters say things like,
“Do you think it’s possible that someone else in the world is doing this very same thing at this very same moment?”
“Why are you listening to someone 100,000 miles away? We’re here.”
Armageddon remarks on closeness and asks, to return to the themes of Michael Bay, what motivates people to do what they do.
But you probably don’t think of Armageddon that way. You probably think of it as a stupid, mindless action movie riddled with plot holes and emblematic of the summer movie culture, shat out by Hollywood entire to cash in on mindless dupes who just want somewhere air-conditioned to eat their popcorn.
And you know what? You have a point. You know that scene in every action movie in which everything doesn’t quite go to plan? Armageddon asks, “what if we made an entire movie out of that moment?” Things go awry, from the first scene on an offshore oil rig to the final moment, and for every moment in between for 3 hours. It’s exhausting to watch.
I’ve never really been compelled by arguments that point out scientific or logical inconsistencies in a movie plot. Each movie has to create a set of events and characters that exist in imagination rather than in reality, otherwise they’d all be documentaries. And in a fictionalized world of a movie the writers can create anything they want, for all I care. With respect to the famous criticism of Armageddon: couldn’t they have just trained a team of astronauts to drill, rather than train a team of drillers to astronaut? This is actually addressed in the plot of the movie. In the Armageddon universe, it is so hard to drill that it’s actually easier to train the drillers to go into space. Who cares if this is true in reality?
On the other hand, a disaster movie like Armageddon has to be based in some sense of reality because the entire premise is to make us as an audience imagine the dread of a world-ending event like a meteor hitting the earth. From that perspective it has to have more in common with the real world than Star Wars or one of those Marvel movies. And there are so many things in Armageddon that feel purely imagined that it makes it hard to focus on what is happening in the movie itself.
Yet, Armageddon has some things going for it – and most of those things can be attributed to Michael Bay.
First of all, Bay finds out how to squeeze tons of exposition into just a few minutes of screen time in order to focus a majority of the film on action. There’s the scene on the oil rig, which has its own bit of action, when we learn about Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and his crew, and A.J. (Affleck) and his relationship with Grace (Liv Tyler), Harry’s daughter. There is a one or two minute scene where Stamper gathers his entire team of drillers in a montage that tells us about who they are and what they like to do with their spare time. Then there’s another minute or two where we see A.J. and Grace together. That’s about it.
Yet the critical mission of the film’s plot takes off merely halfway through the movie and we spend a majority of the film watching the events in space. And as an audience we need to care about those moments we spent with the characters earlier in the film because we need to want A.J. to make it home to Grace. And we need to feel Harry’s sacrifice when he chooses to stay behind spoiler alert and detonate the bomb.
Does it work? Probably not for everyone. A critic would say that all of those action twists and turns could have been better spent establishing character. But the script has so much to chew through, and Armageddon is about watching our working class heroes overcome adversity in one situation after another.
The other thing that I noticed when watching Armageddon (which I last saw in a movie theater with my first girlfriend when I was 13 years old) was how important color was to this movie. I don’t know that the color is supposed to signify anything but there is a great deal of creativity employed with the lighting in Armageddon to create scenes that are doused in striking color. In the scene where Harry convinces Grace that he needs to go into space to solve this problem, Willis is somewhat normally lit, but Tyler’s frame is completely colored in green. In the moment you don’t think much of it because it’s probably some special space command light in the NASA terminal, but it’s an odd and abstract choice for a personal moment between two characters.
The Asteroid itself, computer generated and ominous, is generally surrounded by a purple hue. In fact, space itself is quite starkly lit in Armageddon, perhaps a nod to the otherworldliness of the setting, or perhaps a trick used to make a set look less, well, set-like. This use of color is remniscient of Divinyls’ I touch myself video (previously reviewed here) which also addresses the alien-ness that can be represented by color.
The use of color is key. It may not indicate an underlying lesson, but it does signify craftsmanship. It is a choice that didn’t have to be made when the movie was directed, edited, and shot. And stark differences in color and light typically symbolize other-ness. The theme of distance mentioned above is crucial.
What is more important? Physical distance or emotional distance? How is closeness developed? What kind of connection do people have when they are miles apart? Armageddon suggests that closeness means more than distance, and that there is a force in the universe more important than space and time. Remember 2015’s Interstellar, directed by the acclaimed Christopher Nolan? Is Armageddon really worse than that? Or was it just created by a more derided artisan?
So you may not like Armageddon, plot holes and all, but if you don’t, I think it’s likely that you should blame the writers instead of Michael Bay, who did in fact employ some artfulness in creating it. You know who was on the writing team? Sci-Fi wunderkind J.J. Abrams (who in my opinion still hasn’t written a satisfying movie).
Anyway, It is not always a joy to watch, but it isn’t stupid. And that’s the thing I am curious about. How did Michael Bay get characterized as a director of mindless cinema?
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