Movie Review: Armageddon

Armageddon

I saw Armageddon the weekend it opened four years ago, but hadn't seen it again until this weekend when the video was on sale. The fact that I bought it should tell you a little something about my original opinion of the film: I liked it.

In Armageddon, Bruce Willis plays an oilman who's never found a job he couldn't handle or a hole he couldn't drill. When NASA discovers a giant asteroid only days from a catastrophic impact with Earth, NASA's executive director (Bill Bob Thornton) asks his staff to come up with plans to divert or destroy the monster before it effectively destroys all life on the planet. When scientists agree that the detonation of a nuclear device on a fault line of the asteroid could do the trick, Thornton calls Willis and his team to drill the hole for the bomb (team members include Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, and Michael Clark Duncan). Throughout, Willis' daughter (Liv Tyler) both argues with her father and fights on his behalf as everyone works in a last ditch effort to save the world.

The special effects in Armageddon are quite good, including a particularly effective segment during which Paris is largely destroyed. Some of the science is also good, including a memorable line where Thornton responds to the President's accusations of failure to detect the danger earlier by pointing out that the all-but-nonexistent budget for looking for such dangers only permits NASA to pay attention to 3% of the sky, and "it's a big ass sky". In other places, the science is just plain wrong, including flames and sounds in a vacuum, and impact traumas that should have been coupled with explosive decompression (to be fair, virtually every movie made involving outer space has used sound effects with the explanation that people won't believe it if it doesn't make noise - an explanation that is, sadly, just about right - and explosive decompression is, in a word, really gross). It's completely accurate, however, in its depiction of both the possibility of an asteroid (or coment) impact on Earth today and its likely effects. Unfortunately, the solutions offered and attempted are utterly impossible for us today, not for technological reasons but rather due to a woeful lack of interest from those who hold the purse strings. Still, Armageddon is both suspenseful and touching, and plausible enough that you can forgive much of the poetic license taken.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: Armageddon is rated PG-13. There is some violence, including violent death, but it's not overly graphic. Smaller children will find at least some of the deaths to be traumatic, however, so perhaps those under the age of ten or so should be kept away from this film until they're a little older. As an educational bonus, point out to the kids where the science errors are made (if you don't know, how about making it a point to learn with your kids?).