My Dragons
Nice to be Her
It must be nice to be Liv Tyler. "Daddy, I'm in a movie, could you guys do some songs?"
This thought is brought on by my continuing attempts to drown out Rush Limbaugh, which have presented me with "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing", otherwise known as "That Armageddon song". I actually rather like it (though I probably liked it better before I heard it 15,000 times). And as luck would have it, I got to see Armageddon on Saturday evening.
Now, no one is going to argue that Armageddon is a good movie. (I think it was the Intuitor , which does reviews of movies based on how good their science is, that started its review with "It'll be quicker to tell you what this film got right," but I can't find it on their site to check.) The film's one of two that came out the same year featuring "big rock about to hit Earth" plots, but while Deep Impact is all about the human story (and slightly better physics), Armageddon went straight for action-movie clichés and cute one-liners. Liv Tyler spends a lot of time looking decorative but doesn't get to do much else, and Bruce Willis (as her father) is somber enough that one wonders if he thought he was already on the set of The Sixth Sense. Meanwhile Ben Affleck gets to be The Young Protegé Who Needs to Prove Himself, Michael Clark Duncan is large, and that guy with the funny eyes plays a genius who succumbs to (and oh, don't I wish I were kidding) "space dementia". Oh, and Billy Bob Thornton is in it. Some of the action sequences, set on and near the killer asteroid, feature cuts so quick it's impossible to tell what's happening--this is made more difficult by the fact that all the actors are in space suits (I wanted to write "pressure suits" there, but given the movie we're discussing I think "spacesuits" is a better word) and, the costuming guys not having learned from The Abyss, it's damn tough to see anybody's face. Even the basic source of tension in the final scenes is absurd, as there's no way they could have predicted the moment the rock had to split with such precision, and if they could they'd've damn well told the drillers something an hour or two earlier to guarantee they'd move fast.
All this being said, the film still makes me want to tear up. It's got ten thousand or so years of telling each other stories behind it, and it milks every bit of emotion out of every trick it's got--and damn, it has a lot of them, from the pretty girl realizing that she's seeing the last words of someone she loves to the missing-man formation that flies over the returning heroes1.
I'm really amused by the one guy, who borrowed a hundred grand from a loan shark for his "last night on Earth" party and is worried about paying it back. Dude, you're never going to have to worry about paying for anything again. You'll make your hundred grand in a day or two of talk shows. And neither you nor any of your friends are ever going to have to buy another drink again unless you take great pains to be able to do so...
1: Liam says they couldn't have gotten that together so fast. I say, it had to take at least a few hours to get back from wherever the rock was when it blew, and they landed at Cape Canavrel (it is still called that, yes?); there's got to be seven F16s somewhere within a few hours of there. Besides, this is a movie which features splitting a rock "the size of Texas" with one hydrogen bomb in a hole a mere 800 feet deep, OK?