Armageddon (1998)

The second of a two-pack of peril-by-meteor movies which turned up in 1998, this is the testosterone-fuelled Jerry Bruckheimer / Michael Bay take on an oft-told tale, with the womenfolk shunted to the side as symbols to be saved or prizes to argue over - heroic patriarch Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) clashes with surrogate son A.J. Frost (Ben Affleck) over the affections of actual daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) - while extensive male-bonding takes centre screen and the whole absurd contraption of plot is hurried through at MTV pace, with few shots lingering beyond a second or so and dramatic mood-swings between comedy and tragedy, spectacle and mush. While Deep Impact, which made it to screens first, is a loose reworking of When Worlds Collide, this seems to be modelled on the macho 'dangerous profession' movies Republic Pictures and John Wayne made about deep-sea diving or wildcat oil drilling in the 1940s.

After Charlton Heston (sounding like the Voice of God) has explained that the dinosaurs were wiped out after a meteor hit (an event we witness from space) and that this is bound to happen again, we leap forward a billion years or so and find New York taking a preliminary pelting from mini-meteors (one of which sees off a potential rival to the film by burning a Godzilla figure) in what now seems like the last of the pre-9/11 disaster-as-spectacle scenes. The high concept is that the US government decides to save the world by teaming up the resources of NASA's mission control, headed by crippled Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton), and a brawling bunch of oil prospectors, planning that they should take a space shuttle to the approaching asteroid ('Dottie') and plant a nuclear weapon which will theoretically blow it to pieces and off its lethal course.

As indicated by Willis's introductory scene, in which he pelts Greenpeace protestors with golfballs from the deck of his drilling vessel, a Neanderthal Republican radicalism lurks inside the packaging, with offhand gags about heroes who never want to pay tax again and a general marginalisation of the rest of the world as America unilaterally sorts out the globe's troubles. The film keeps its plot boiling by having characters go mad: from Peter Stormare's stir-crazy Russian cosmonaut through Steve Buscemi's unstable trouble-maker (he straddles the nuclear bomb in order to imitate Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove) to William Fichtner's sneaky by-the-book spaceman. The asteroid is brilliantly designed, the value-for-money cast snarl out their jokey dialogue with style (Will Patton even works in a tiny streak of pathos as the sidekick) and the special effects destruction is certainly up to standard, but the script keeps self-destructing and, like too many Bay movies, it just goes on and on.

It winds up with a ludicrous exercise in self-sacrifice as Willis blows himself up along with the rock in order to a) save the Earth and b) enable his daughter's under-the-end-credits wedding. Also aboard: Keith David (ruthless general), Owen Wilson (who argues with Affleck over who gets to be Han Solo), Jason Isaacs (boffin), Grace Zabriskie (as the original 'life-sucking bitch' after which the rock is named), Udo Kier (shrink), Michael Clarke Duncan ('Bear', a character name which might just import the usual Bruckheimer gay subtext), astronaut Shannon Lucid (a real name which renders Hollywood screenwriting obsolete), Lawrence Tierney and Gedde Watanabe.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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