Armageddon (1998/I)

User Rating:

6.0/10   

Director:

Michael Bay

Writers (WGA):

Jonathan Hensleigh (screenplay) and
J.J. Abrams (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

1 July 1998 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Romance | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline:

It's Closer Than You Think.

Plot:

When an asteroid the size of Texas is headed for Earth the world's best deep core drilling team is sent to nuke the rock from the inside.

Plot Keywords:

Asteroid | Drill | NASA | Astronaut | Nuclear

Awards:

Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 12 wins & 27 nominations

Cast

Bruce Willis	...	Harry Stamper
Billy Bob Thornton	...	Dan Truman
Ben Affleck	...	A.J. Frost
Liv Tyler	...	Grace Stamper
Will Patton	...	Chick
Steve Buscemi	...	Rockhound
William Fichtner	...	Colonel Willie Sharp
Owen Wilson	...	Oscar
Michael Clarke Duncan	...	Bear
Peter Stormare	...	Lev Andropov
Ken Hudson Campbell	...	Max (as Ken Campbell)
Jessica Steen	...	Co-Pilot Jennifer Watts
Keith David	...	General Kimsey
Chris Ellis	...	Flight Director Clark
Jason Isaacs	...	Ronald Quincy

MPAA:

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi disaster action, sensuality and brief language.

Runtime:

150 min | USA:153 min (director's cut)

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Russian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.20 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

Taiwan:PG-12 | Philippines:PG-13 | Finland:K-12 (1998) | Canada:14 (Nova Scotia) | Canada:G (Quebec) | Canada:PA (Manitoba) | Canada:PG (Alberta/British Columbia/Ontario) | Argentina:13 | Australia:M | Belgium:KT | Brazil:12 | Chile:14 | Denmark:15 | France:U | Germany:12 (w) | Hong Kong:IIA | Iceland:LH (video rating) | Iceland:L (original rating) | Italy:T | Netherlands:12 | Norway:15 | Portugal:M/12 | Singapore:PG | South Korea:12 | Sweden:11 | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) | UK:12 | USA:PG-13 (certificate #36122) | USA:Unrated (director's cut)

Filming Locations:

4th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Touchstone Pictures

Trivia:

The film opened on Liv Tyler's 21st birthday.

Goofs:

Factual errors: The woman at NASA (looking at footage with the guys) says that it's "Armstrong bouncing at the surface". That is Aldrin. Almost every shot outside "The Eagle" are of him.

Quotes:

[first lines]
[Camera shoots past the moon to slowly zoom in on the Earth]
Narrator: This is the Earth, at a time when the dinosaurs roamed a lush and fertile planet.
[From behind the camera, a giant asteroid appears, speeding towards the Earth ahead of it]
Narrator: A piece of rock just 6 miles wide changed all that.
[Blazing through the atmosphere, the asteroid impacts with a spectacular display of fire and destruction]
Narrator: It hit with the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons. A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere, creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years. It happened before. It will happen again. It's just a question of when.

Movie Connections:

Spoofed in "Robot Chicken: Plastic Buffet (#1.4)" (2005)

Soundtrack:

Don't Blame Me, My dear

The Good & Bad Of 'Armageddon'

This could have been super but, as with the case of most modern action films, the action is way overdone. Still, it had its moments.....

THE BAD -One word describes a lot of scenes in here: chaos. Things are blown up all over the place, people are shouting everywhere. It gets to be too much, especially in the last hour which gets ludicrous. You practically have a headache when you're finished watching the 150 minutes of mayhem.

Half of the disasters that happen to the astronauts were not needed, and many of them come one after the other. It wound up muddling the story. Do today's filmmakers think you have to have something dramatic and loud every two minutes to keep their audiences? And talk about loud.....holy eardrums, Bataman, you could be deaf listening to this movie which includes a lot of loud heavy-metal "music." It's too noisy.

There are touches of "Independence Day" mentality with very unrealistic with a veteran astronaut smuggling a gun on board a ship; the daughter of the one of the astronauts barging into the command center and shoving the center's leader in the middle of a crisis (in reality, she wouldn't be allowed in the room to begin with); and the usual last-second impossible heroics. I mean, sometimes I swear I was watching a movie made specifically for morons. Speaking of stupid, what was that goofy cosmonaut character (Peter Stormare) all about. That's just another example of what I was just talking about - totally unrealistic people. Why does Hollywood like to portray astronauts - some of the classiest, most educated and reserved people in the world - in such a negative light? Just another of its sicknesses, I guess where good is bad and bad is good.

THE GOOD - What was great to watch in this film were the special-effects, especially the disaster scenes with the meteors hitting the earth. They were spectacular. A few of the panoramic scenes in here were beautiful, too. (This is a must for widescreen DVD.)

There is a good mix of humor in this adventure thriller. That humor makes some of the characters likable, even though they are still unrealistically sleazy heroes. Steve Buscemi had most of the good comedic lines. I liked Billy Bob Thornton as the NASA boss. He's very interesting to watch. Bruce Willis plays his normal macho-hero role. His heroic effort in the end is nicely sentimental. The special-effects, as mentioned earlier, were perhaps the best right in the first 5-10 minutes of the film - a real attention-grabber right off the bat. Actually, the first half of this film is far better than the second half.