Read Mixed User Reviews for Armageddon

5

Trev29Jun 9, 2013

A pretty mediocre movie. Although saying that about a Michael Bay film is about as big a compliment as I can give him. Music is decent at times. but just isn't all that thrilling.

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5

CineAutoctonoDec 19, 2015

A regular movie , because in some scenes were exciting , but very boring with the rest , but the fact of dying Porun asteroid is latent but not overestimated Michael Bay a bad run of a director, but there is no way to add another opinion.

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4

FlickFreaks83Dec 11, 2015

The latest entry in the "let's kick some asteroid butt" stakes is a doomsday countdown spectacle from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and "Bad Boy" Bay that extends their commitment to extreme tosh. With no messing about, this opens on theThe latest entry in the "let's kick some asteroid butt" stakes is a doomsday countdown spectacle from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and "Bad Boy" Bay that extends their commitment to extreme tosh. With no messing about, this opens on the demolition of downtown Manhattan plus the imperilment of a nice little dog, all within a few minutes. Yikes! It's a meteor shower, heralding "the worst parts of the Bible" to come, and the first of a thousand-and-one big bangs: whenever there's a lull in proceedings, there's a wake-up call such as the splattering of Shanghai or - a highlight - the annihilation of Paris.

At the obligatory scientific-military crisis conflab with NASA's director (Thornton) we get a refresher course in extermination events. This particular cosmic uh-oh, Asteroid Dottie, is the size of Texas and will hit planet Earth in 18 days, leaving not even a bacterium alive. Our only hope is for a rock rendezvous mission to drill a hole deep into the sucker and nuke it at the core. Hence the urgent need to locate "the world's best deep-core driller". Cue Bruce Willis as Harry Stamper, a rowdy, globe-trotting maverick inspired by famed oil well firefighter Red Adair. Harry graciously agrees to save the world - like ya do - but only if he can take his own team with him.

Enter a ragtag bag of roughneck, rambunctious and ex-criminal cowboys who include Harry's calm best buddy (Will Patton), a gigantic muscleman Ving Rhames lookalike (Michael Clarke Duncan), a Zen-babbling young dude Matthew McConaughey lookalike (Owen Wilson), the handsome reckless stud (Affleck) - who's in love with Harry's gorgeous, headstrong daughter (Tyler) - and a wisecracking weirdo genius geologist (it could only be Steve Buscemi). Et voila, it's The Dirty Dozen in space! Except there are eight of them. Plus some Dudley Do-Right astronauts to shudder at the rogues' "wrong stuff" and shepherd them to where a driller's gotta do what a driller's gotta do. That's after they've raised hell in training, milked their comic schticks so long you hope all of them die, and bade their tender, tearful farewells, amid slo-mo homages to sundry heroic space films.

In addition to the two credited with the screenplay, Jonathan Hensleigh (The Rock, Con Air), and J.J. Abrams (Forever Young), a veritable mob of "serious" screenwriters - including Robert Towne, Paul Attanasio and Scott Rosenberg - was deployed to provide action ideas, key dramatic sequences, wisecracks for the boys. Collectively they should be cringing, because much of this opus has the basic content and tone of a Coca-Cola ad: extras clustered for intermittent, picturesque group poses at the Taj Mahal, a Midwestern farmstead or a Balkans village, eyeing the skies and sharing the moment. There are also abundant gag-making shots of stoic principals framed by the Stars And Stripes, hammering home the inadequacies of the Russians with their delapidated spaceware, or anyone else on earth, to undertake the task at hand.

A long halfway in, our hooligans finally lift off in two shuttles with their astronaut minders, and everything that can go wrong does, with bells on. There can't have been one explosives guy in Hollywood who didn't rack up major overtime pay while a rendezvous with the Mir space station adds a wacky space cosmonaut (Buscemi's lethal Fargo henchman partner Peter Stormare) to the team.

Had Armageddon foregone the comedy and corn, the film would have been an hour long instead of the two-and-a-half in which some potentially thrilling momentum is lost. But Bruckheimer's genius for posturing, vulgarity and cheap sentiment fun rivals Cecil B. DeMille's (hey, he even uses Charlton Heston as narrator!) To its credit, more happens in the first five minutes of Armageddon than in the whole of Deep Impact, and if you get off on global catastrophe you'll enjoy this more.

It's a million laughs (many of them unintentional), and it even has a mildly revolutionary ending. In a dismal summer for popcorn movies, this epic may be the silliest but still looks like the best shot.… Expand

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5

FuturedirectorMar 15, 2016

Of course, Armageddon shows the audience how beautiful are the visual-effects nowadays, and it's full of heart and honest emotions. Sadly, this film contains a little kind of thin premise and unremarkable characters, with a thrillingOf course, Armageddon shows the audience how beautiful are the visual-effects nowadays, and it's full of heart and honest emotions. Sadly, this film contains a little kind of thin premise and unremarkable characters, with a thrilling story-telling but a, critcly, terrible idea, showing a real future moment in a wrong way.… Expand

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5

MovieManiac1994Jan 4, 2016

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer knows his core audience is small-town America, so he panders to them. He plays to their simple, fierce patriotism, uneducated view of the non-USA world and diminished, MTV-assaulted attention span. Consequently, heProducer Jerry Bruckheimer knows his core audience is small-town America, so he panders to them. He plays to their simple, fierce patriotism, uneducated view of the non-USA world and diminished, MTV-assaulted attention span. Consequently, he makes big, loud and successful blockbuster movies with stories every toddler can follow, told with overblown action-speak dialogue. It's both his strength and his weakness.

To this end, Armageddon flaunts the traditional disaster-movie stencil of building up the characters for the first 30 minutes. But we're too easily bored with that: we need faster, louder, bigger things to keep our attention. And Armageddon delivers: a space shuttle explodes and New York City is rocked by asteroid fragments that sever skyscrapers and send buses spinning through the streets in flames. It's a blockbuster opening made in heaven.

And while other disaster films are still mapping out their relationships, we flit frantically between giant telescopes, presidential meetings and NASA brain-storms, finally settling on an oil rig, where (for beautiful-daughter-related reasons) boss-man Harry (Willis) is chasing rebellious young redneck AJ (Affleck) around with a shotgun. It's an elephant syringe of attractive characters and plot exposition, speedballed in about the same time it takes to knock-up a Pot Noodle. "Breathless" doesn't even come close to describing the opening third.

But then, director Bay's pop-promo past comes back to haunt him as Armageddon fails to provide a satisfying pay-off. The set-up, delivered in sound-and-vision bites, is exhilarating, just as oil riggers being rounded up by the FBI in strip-joints looks great in shaky-cam. But Bay's talent is in capturing single, explosive moments, such as New York's swirl of fast-cut, high-octane devastation.

Once the shuttles are in flight, what's required (and distinctly lacking here) is a more linear method of storytelling. Between the unusual asteroid location and the rat-a-tat editing, it's hard to tell which characters are in which of the space shuttles, let alone what they are doing. A potentially great landing approach, for example, leaves you disorientated and squinty-eyed rather than high on adrenalin.

Plot ceases to exist and is replaced by a number of identikit action sequences that could have appeared in any order. There's a technical hitch, a crazed driller ("My God, he's got space dementia!") and a meteor shower, but no sense of impending doom. Compounding this modular feeling, events are sprung on the viewer with no build-up at all. "Look out! Meteor! BAM!" Another fatality. "Look out! Gas pocket! BAM!" It's supposed to be thrilling, but it's just confusing.

Thus the first act makes promises that the next two can't keep. It's annoying, as there's so much here to like: the ensemble cast is uniformly engaging, the dialogue is as funny and sparky as it is unlikely, and the effects are astonishing. Want to apportion blame? Then hurl it at Bay (for his over-editing) and the writers (for forgetting to insert a central plot).

Since it's an American film, they're allowed to save the world single-handedly. But do they really have to deck out every cute child in US-flag T-shirts, set every press conference against Stars And Stripes backdrops, and portray every other race in the crudest stereo-typical terms, with Indians in turbans gathered by the Taj Mahal and Italians on scooters outside pavement cafés? On the strength of recent releases, it would seem that they do.

Big explosions and WWF-style characterisations make this perfect fodder for excitable 12-year-olds. But, with a plot-free second half, it's more a $140 million pizza-and-six-pack film than a worthy con-tender to action classics like Face/Off or Die Hard.… Expand

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4

MovieManiac83Apr 25, 2015

Armageddon's Charlton Heston-voiced opening narration, an account of how an asteroid seems to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is an ominous touch in every sense of the phrase. The text of the speech sets the stage for the threatArmageddon's Charlton Heston-voiced opening narration, an account of how an asteroid seems to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is an ominous touch in every sense of the phrase. The text of the speech sets the stage for the threat of mass destruction promised by the movie's title, while Heston's voice assures that the threat will be addressed in the most American way possible. And it is, thanks to a photogenic, ragtag bunch of misfits headed by Bruce Willis. Willis plays the world's greatest oil driller, recruited by NASA head Billy Bob Thornton to plant a nuclear bomb in the belly of an earthbound asteroid. Will Willis overcome his creepy attachment to his daughter (Liv Tyler), and reconcile with her oil-drilling lover (Ben Affleck) in time to save America and the rest of the world? What suspense there is in Armageddon naturally lies elsewhere. Will, for instance, director Michael Bay (The Rock) continue to find an excuse to place an American flag in every other shot? (This at one point includes a shot showing that the patriotic astronauts have gone to the trouble of planting one on the asteroid they intend to blow up.) Will Tyler be photographed in a way that doesn't make her look as if she's posing for a Revlon ad? Will this be the one film featuring a ragtag bunch of misfits in which the lovable fat guy makes it out alive? Fortunately, the near-incomprehensibility of the numerous action scenes and the disposability of the rest of the movie allow plenty of time to contemplate such things. The entire second half seems to consist of nothing but vibrating close-ups of heads shouting lines like, "I'm not leaving without my men!" and "We're jumping over that canyon!" As with The Rock, Bay directs Armageddon in a way that seems more concerned with constantly assaulting the senses than anything else, hoping perhaps that the quick cuts and constant explosions will distract from his film's many flaws. Unless you're extremely easily entertained, they probably won't.… Expand

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4

ryancarroll88Aug 27, 2010

There are worse disaster movies out there, but there are also shorter ones (the popcorn tends to run out about halfway through the film, and then what do you do from there?)

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5

movieccFeb 26, 2011

The movie is like a roller coaster, but it is one without the need of seat belts. The movie definitely has certain thrills especially in the front part but it is quite boring throughout . A movie to watch unless you have lots of time to waste.