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Armageddon
Retrospectives
- February 2004
USA, 1998. Directed by Michael Bay. Produced
by Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, Gale Anne Hurd. Written by J.J. Abrams,
Tony Gilroy, Jonathan Hensleigh, Robert Roy Pool, Shane Salerno. Photographed
by John Schwartzman. Edited by Mark Goldblatt, Chris Lebenzon, Glen Scantlebury.
Music by Trevor Rabin. Released by Buena Vista. 144
minutes.
Starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton,
Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen
Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Peter Stormare, Ken Hudson Campbell, Jessica
Steen, Keith David, Chris Ellis, Jason Isaacs.
I have a friend who says I'm like a battered wife
when it comes to Michael Bay. He keeps disappointing me, and I go back for
more. Silly young wide-eyed thirteen-year-old me, who rented "Bad Boys" the
week it came out on video. I figured it would be like "Beverly Hills Cop"
and "Lethal Weapon" for the new generation, and it had to be cool with Fresh
Prince as the star. Then it turned out to be sort of not very funny and sort
of violent and ugly, and I didn't know what I'd seen. Eighteen years old,
and I'm still an idiot: I see "Pearl Harbor" the day it comes out, jazzed
for a year by the teaser trailer and expecting some kind of awesome epic
masterpiece. It turned out to be "Pearl Harbor".
I'd like to think I'm not a battered wife. I have
learned my lesson, and now am firmly on the bandwagon of those who think
Bay's work sucks. But still, I'm fascinated. This guy is an expert at pandering
-- he's the kind of director Jerry Bruckheimer lies awake dreaming about,
a whiz kid who wants nothing more than to blow stuff up real expensively,
while throwing insincere love stories into the mix so the studio can be happy
it will suck in teenage girls as well as boys. He gets more attention than
most of these hacks because he has real talent -- talent enough to always
break box office records, always get interesting casts and stories, and to
have his own distinctive style.
The style is ugly, with the camera and the cuts
swooshing past everything that's going on, and the level of gloss like a
wall between us and the movie. It gave a crappy feel to "The Rock", which
in some ways was a good film. It ruined "Bad Boys", and made clear how aggressive
and phoney the dialogue really was. But in "Armageddon" there
are moments where we see how it could work, where the material comes alive
and we glimpse what could have been.
See, I want there to be a good movie about an
asteroid coming to hit the earth. It would be nice for at least one of these
end-of-the-world action pictures to work, when "Independence Day" doesn't
stand up to repeated viewing and "Deep Impact" was nonsense. "Armageddon"
has scenes that feel just right, the ones in the NASA control rooms, where
Bay's swooshing helps us sense the pressure of the clock, and Billy Bob Thornton
gives a quiet, knowing, intense performance, and Jason Isaacs makes junk
science seem like merciless fact. The obligatory moments where military men
fool around and almost ruin the whole plan are actually very tense: This
is the end of the world we're talking about, where every decision is a comment
on human nature. I actually think it's rousing when Thornton breaks his calm,
firms up his gaze and shouts, "This is one order you shouldn't follow, and
you fucking know it."
Perhaps these scenes work because they're all
math, statistics, plot updates and discussions of specific options. Bay's
style is impersonal, and it doesn't matter in these moments because the details
of the story are speaking for themselves. I even like the bits where he cuts
around the world and shows folk from other cultures looking up at the sky,
wondering if they'll live another day. The peasants gaze and hope, the American
president addresses the world with an inspirational speech -- hokey stock
scenes, but Bay knows how to slick them up, and they're moving in some silly,
phoney way.
Where things fall apart are the scenes that try
to put in characterisation, and, God help us, comic relief. The movie stars
Bruce Willis, as the leader of the deep-core drilling team who will go up
to the asteroid and create the hole for the nuclear bombs. The first time
we see him, he's on the side of an oil rig, shooting golf balls at Greenpeace
protestors. Five minutes later he's got an arrogant grimace and glazed-over
eyes, and he's chasing Ben Affleck with a shotgun. This is supposed to be
'zany'.
The worst bits of humour involve Steve Buscemi;
there's a passing mention that he's the genius of the team, and he used to
lecture at MIT, but most of the dialogue shoots out crude offhand references
to the fact he's some sort of sex pest. Everyone does a double-take at the
beginning when Liv Tyler, as Willis's daughter, says he showed her how to
use tampons as a kid. When the feds arrive to take away Willis and brief
him on the mission, Buscemi looks nervous and says out of the blue, "I swear
to God, she never told me her age!"
There is more awful dialogue: The sober-faced
Will Patton looks embarrassed as he says, "This has turned into a surrealistic
nightmare!" There is the Peter Stormare character, a crazy Russian astronaut
who has spent a few decades on Mir and does some insane screeching that comes
across more startling than eccentric or funny. It's supposed to make everything
seem human and enjoyable, but it's in bad taste, it sticks out, it's awful.
Bay's players scream at each other and unleash improvised one-liners, and
in the middle of his frenzied style, it doesn't work. It's the reason why
critics call his movies psychologically screwed; relying on bad jokes and
unfunny banter, and cranking it up this much, he makes scenes shapeless heaps
of immature thought and weird hostility.
Perhaps if Bay got scripts that didn't try so
hard to cover every base of emotion, or if he improved his taste buds, he
would make some good films. He could do what Tony Scott did, honing his skills
and making his name with Bruckheimer action, and steering away from it in
the second phase of his career. But I dunno. I've heard the commentary on
the DVD, where we get to know Michael through such pearls of wisdom as, "In
a movie, you never kill a dog or kids. It's just a rule!"
On the subject of why Buscemi suddenly gets a
gattling gun out of nowhere in outer space and starts firing at the equipment,
the characters inform us, "He's got space dementia!" Bay has another explanation:
"The gun is there because of… toys. Now, I know that's a very bad thing,
but I had to have something for my younger audience." Not that he doesn't
care about cinema: "When I was a kid, I loved to go see movies that were
more mature than I was able to understand. Like 'The Poseidon
Adventure'!"
I can't believe I'm even debating this movie,
but it was the highest-grossing film of its year, it won the MTV Movie Award
for best picture, it's got a Criterion DVD to its name and I know a lot of
people who think the ending is emotional. Not the same lots who like "Pearl
Harbor", but, ya know, smart people.
So what am I missing? Bay and Bruckheimer keep
repeating that it's one of those movies where you've 'just gotta wanna be
entertained', as if this a real defence, and as if it isn't true of every
movie ever made. What I don't get is how the science fiction can be concentrated
on when so many other tones keep undermining it, or how people let the emotion
get to them, when it's such an over-the-top parody of sentimental soupiness,
and when the movie keeps distracting us from the focused moments with its
jackass sense of fun. The city of Paris gets obliterated in one scene, and
in the next, we're back on the spaceship with wisecracks like, "These parts
were made in Taiwan!" and "Oh, that's bad!"
Alas. As much as we pant and scream, Bay makes
millions, has his finger on the pulse of the masses, and has his defenders
among critics and fans. Of them, I can't help feeling there's a streak of
put-on populism. They look at the box-office figures and convince themselves
that this guy is not only some sort of new Tony Scott, but maybe a new Steven
Spielberg. They think up bullshit rationalisations and they shove them down
our throats. They hope for the day he really does make good movies, so they
can look back and say they told us so. Welcome to the 21st
Century.
COPYRIGHT©
2004 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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