Armageddon
This is absolutely ridiculous, but doesn’t cross the second line into absolutely bonkers. It remains sadly grounded in jingoism, bad one liners, and stupid camera movements.
It’s just so macho and religious, forced into a script containing cussing, sex before marriage, whoring, loan sharks (60% interest rates, hot damn!). The “hero” also harasses the Greenpeace boat by chucking golf ball at them, complaining about his 50 grand in contributions.
With a throwaway scene, the entire ideology is summed up. Let’s not even get into the Aerosmith songs as backdrop to Steven Tyler pimping out his own daughter. Fucking vile.
There are just too many explosions, it reaches white noise levels. Everytime there’s a stretch of 5 minutes without shit blowing up, the plot stops to contrive something.
Paris is blown up (the Arc de Triomphe remains), and “Shanghai” is destroyed, but it appears to be based on 19 century opium wars Shanghai, not a burgeoning modern metropolis of millions. Not even other films are safe. Godzilla is mocked, Pulp Fiction (starring Bruce Willis) is mocked, even Dr. Strangelove is mentioned.
The early mini-disaster movie is preposterous. Grand Central Station being obliterated is nice (the Trump Tower is just next door), you can even see the World Trade Center being hit by a massive meteorite in the corner.
Like The Day After Tomorrow, there’s an homeless black guy with a dog, but here, he’s the comic relief. Come to think of it, every single character is the comic relief.
The “altitude sickness” takes the fucking cake. I felt my IQ lowering, I don’t understand how William Fichtner said “He’s got space dementia” without laughing.
The whole cast is nuts, major actors in basic cameos that do not matter to the plot in the slightest. Michael Bay gets a posse together that gets reused on his best film: The Island. Even Steve Buscemi and Shawnee Smith are together.
Charleston Heston does the opening narration (literal seconds only!). Billy Bob Thorton does a Texas accent. Stormare does his worst Russian impression. Perusing the credits I saw core Buffy alumni Sarah Michelle Gellar, Allison Hannigan and Anthony Head, but I missed them in the film.
Michael Bay himself has a cameo when they say “we’re moving the Hubble”, in a lab coat.
Hard to believe Ben “fake blue collar guy” Affleck said this:
I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers and he told me to shut the fuck up. So, that was the end of that talk.
Wait a fucking second, this was written by Tony “Andor” Gilroy e JJ Abrams? What the actual fuck, I bet JJ rewrote the entire thing and nothing remained.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.