FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| FILM Armageddon One day, all movies will be like this one. And on that dark day, the world will end. Real wrath-of-God type stuff. Skies falling. Seas boiling. Dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria. Yes, forget asteroids colliding with Earth. Here's the real reason the dinosaurs died - they made a movie this bad. Armageddon scares the shit out of me. And not because of the boring apocalypse-by-numbers destruction scenes. No, it's scary because it's the shape of things to come: caffeine-fueled editing, Nike ad cinematography, pigeonhole casting, seven-man committee screenwriting, lowest common denominator plot, random soundtrack and shorthand moviemaking. Sure, all summer movies have these things in common, but Armageddon raises it to a Zen-like state of high nothingness, a place cleansed of a single original thought or redeeming feature. It's so terrible it's almost beautiful to behold. Here's a sample: Once NASA announces the approaching asteroid will kill all life on earth ("even bacteria!"), we're treated to a sort of greatest hits highlight reel of the human race that exists solely in the minds of advertising executives. Freckle-faced Norman Rockwell kids building soap box racers. Twinkly eyed Welsh grandmas herding sheep. Rose-cheeked Italian cherubs running through cobblestone streets dodging nuns. Because hey, it's not just any world on the brink here, it's a FedEx world! The best kinda world there is! Director Michael Bay, making the first official movie for the PlayStation generation, uses every visual trick from every TV commercial ever made to pound you into your seat. Like some five-year-old kid hopped up on pixie sticks, his camera can't sit still for two seconds. It swoops, it dollies, it tilts, it zooms, it cranes, it flips, it does the hokey pokey and it turns itself around... and that's just for a cutaway shot of some guy picking up his car keys. I'm sure the effects are great... if you could see them. The script - something about a bunch of oil rig workers blasted into space - is patched together and compartmentalized like some half-baked TV dinner, each writer chipping in with his own specialty for maximum demographic effect. There's the romantic chunk, the comedy chunk, the pop-culture-reference chunk, the patriotic flag-waving chunk... but it's only for show. This isn't a movie about people. It's a movie about an ad about a movie. It won't be loved. It won't even be well liked. But it will be liked enough. It won't make a billion dollars, but it will make enough. Enough to make the next one, anyway. And so on. And so on. Or in the words of Bruce Willis, "Now let's drill this iron bitch!" Yes, This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang. But a one-liner. |