Movie review: Armageddon

Of all the Michael Bay movies I have ever seen, Armageddon was the loudest and Bay-iest. I don't think this review quite captures the schizoid sense of hyperkinetic boredom the movie induced in me; I kept realizing throughout the press screening that I was in a movie theatre, watching a film that was very loud and flashy indeed, only to have my attention wander off for a few moments until I remembered where I was again.

Armageddon
Chris Galdieri
webdate: 6/26/98


Despite its enormous budget, generally talented cast, and high concept,
Armageddon is an overlong disappointment that fails to use any of its
potential assets to its advantage.

The premise of the movie is simple: a Texas-sized asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. Since the asteroid is too big to blow up from the outside, NASA sends a team of deep-core oil drillers, led by Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), to drill a hole deep into the asteroid, where a nuclear warhead can be detonated and thus prevent the asteroid from destroying Earth and every living thing on it.

The first twenty minutes or so of the movie are promising. NASA discovers that the asteroid is approaching when a meteor shower destroys the space shuttle Atlantis and meteor strikes rain down on the Earth from Finland to South Carolina. NASA chief Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton, easily the best thing in the movie) convenes a meeting of top scientists to figure out exactly what's going on. And what's going on, they determine, is that the asteroid will strike Earth in a mere 18 days. The meeting itself is everything the rest of the movie isn't: suspenseful, informative, and tense, with a sense of impending danger that's strangely absent from the rest of the movie.

The film goes astray with the introduction of Willis' oil drillers. The urgent tone of the movie goes flying out the window as the drill crew, whose personality quirks (one's a cowboy, one's a womanizer, one's a gambler, one's a fat guy, ad nauseum) seem to have been decided by focus group, becomes the focus of the action. Aside from the wild improbability of NASA picking amateur astronauts to carry out the most important mission in the history of humanity, there are so many drillers that it's difficult, if not impossible, to keep them straight, never mind get to know or care about them.

One driller who does get plenty of attention is A.J. (Ben Affleck), who is clandestinely seeing Harry's daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler). This romance, along with Grace's estrangement from her father, is presumably intended to give the film an emotional resonance, but it falls flat. Affleck and Tyler have no chemistry and their scenes are almost painful to watch. An early effort to establish Grace as a strong young woman is quickly abandoned and Grace becomes just a daughter and girlfriend waiting for her father and her boyfriend to return from the mission. Worst of all, once the drillers set out into space, Grace has absolutely nothing to do but wander around Mission Control looking concerned. Which she does, in shot after shot after shot. Tyler's performance does nothing to compensate for the writing, but in all fairness to Ms. Tyler, it's doubtful that anyone could have made this character work.

One of the most maddening aspects of Armageddon is the lack of attention paid to scientific detail. The movie is rife with such impossibilities as sound in space, characters breathing in airlocks which should be empty, and spacesuits (made from a substance that looks suspiciously like corduroy) that magically compensate for the microgravity of the asteroid's surface. One of the characters actually gets "space dementia." A more reasonable explanation would be that the character had too much oxygen in his air supply, but that would have required too much homework for the scriptwriters.

The movie also asks us to believe that NASA, which we're told is as woefully underfunded in Armageddon as it is in real life at the start of the film, has two top-secret super-advanced space shuttles that can be prepped for launch in something like a week, and that these super-shuttles have been designed to land on and take off from the craggy surface of an asteroid. And while I'm no geologist, a hole less than a quarter of a mile deep doesn't seem like it would make all that much of a difference on an asteroid we're told is the size of Texas (and is that in cubic or square feet, anyway? And why are things always the size of Texas? Wouldn't an asteroid the size of Rhode Island or Delaware be plenty scary on its own?).

Armageddon also suffers by not describing in any detail just what the drillers are supposed to do when they get to the asteroid. Sure, we know they're drilling a hole and dropping a nuclear warhead down it, but we're
never told anything about drilling. The result is that we never have any idea what the drillers are doing on the asteroid's surface, and thus there's no real suspense during the actual drilling scenes. Since we don't know what's happening we can't care about what we're seeing, and whenever anything happens, we don't know what it means until one of the characters reacts.

The soundtrack is particularly distracting. Ambient noise, sound effects, and what seems like an endless string of Aerosmith songs all overwhelm spoken dialogue for what feels like almost a quarter of the film. And with a running time of two and a half hours, the film is far too long.

Somewhere along the line, this could have been a genuinely good science fiction film. Instead, it's a mess that veers from scene to scene with little internal consistency and never gives a reason to care about what was happening onscreen. Armageddon promises a bang but delivers a whimper.

Movie review: Disturbing Behavior

My only professional qualification for doing movie reviews was the fact that I was the only person on staff who lived close enough to D.C. (our offices were in Manassas, Virginia) to attend press screenings. I enjoyed reviewing quite a lot, and not just because of the free movies. This was one of the earliest reviews that I wrote, for an early version of the low-budget, low-wattage horror films that young actors are required to do by law these days. I think posting this review is the first time I've thought about this movie since 1998; at the time, Katie Holmes was an up-and-coming starlet. Now she's Tom Cruise's pet and something of a national punchline. Life is weird.

Not At All Disturbing, Not Even the Smallest Little Bit
Chris Galdieri
webdate: 7/24/98

The only thing that's genuinely disturbing about Disturbing Behavior is the fact that such a disjointed, incoherent, and poorly constructed film actually made it to the screen.

The movie is set in Cradle Bay, a town on an island in Washington State, and centers around Steve Clark (James Marsden), whose family moves there in search of a fresh start after Steve's brother commits suicide. In addition to a nearly formalized array of cliques at the local high school -- car guys, computer geeks, skateboarders, and the like -- there are also the "Blue Ribbons," the squeaky-clean jock- and cheerleader-types who belong to a nebulously explained youth group run by Dr. Caldicott (Bruce Greenwood), the school psychiatrist. You can tell right away there's something odd about the Blue Ribbons: they wear (gasp!) sweater vests! They hang out at the (horrors!) yogurt shop! They listen to (oh, the humanity!) Wayne Newton!

Actually, that last one is pretty scary.

In addition to their ultra-clean-cut appearance, the Blue Ribbons are known from time to time to fly into fits of uncontrollable rage, attacking anyone nearby. For some reason, no one in town seems to mind, and the local sheriff gladly covers up any incidents.

The only kids at school who think there's something odd about all this are Gavin (Nick Stahl), his pasty-faced doper friend U.V., and Rachel (Dawson's Creek's Katie Holmes). You can tell right away that she's a bad grrl: she's got a bunch of piercings and wears leather. She pouts and rolls her eyes a lot, too. Who said method acting was dead?

Gavin is convinced that he saw one member of the Blue Ribbons kill a girl and a sheriff's deputy, but no one believes him. Apparently, no one notices when the girl and the deputy stop showing up for school and work, either. Gavin is certain that some kind of mind control is behind the Blue Ribbons and the radical behavioral changes that students undergo when they join the group.
Steve and Rachel don't believe Gavin's conspiracy theory, of course, until one night when Gavin's parents sign him up for the Blue Ribbons. And the next day, Gavin shows up for school with a haircut and wearing a dreaded sweater vest.

Once this happens, Steve and Rachel investigate, and find themselves plunged into a web of conspiracy and deception, learn that the Blue Ribbons have been brainwashed by Dr. Caldicott, yada yada yada.

There's very little in this movie that hasn't been seen before, and done better, in other movies. Een the film's press materials refer to the teens as "Stepford-like." What we see of the Blue Ribbons' indoctrination is a riff on the brainwashing tapes from The Parallax View. Other sequences have been lifted in toto from Total Recall and Star Trek III. When a movie starts ripping off an odd-numbered Star Trek movie, you know there's a problem. Even the Blue Ribbons' name calls to mind The Wave, that ABC Afterschool Special where a teacher turned his class into brainwashed neo-Nazis and used blue as the group's unifying symbolic color.

Structurally, the film is a mess and displays no internal consistency in terms of time or geography. It's the kind of movie where two characters can start having a conversation at the high school in one scene and are on the beach in the next continuing the conversation exactly where it left off at the high school. In another sequence, Steve and his friends decide at the end of the school day to go get beer. Hey, they are rebels, after all. When we cut to them in the parking lot of the grocery store, trying to find an adult to buy said beer for them, it's pitch dark out. Either this is appallingly sloppy construction, or Cradle Bay is on one big darn island and only has one grocery store.

The script has the characters do things that make little or no sense simply to advance the plot along. At one point, Steve is attacked by a group of Blue Ribbons -- while he's taking a walk through the woods at night in the rain. At another point, Gavin overhears the meeting at which his parents sign him up for the Blue Ribbons. He knows that if he goes home, he'll be brainwashed. So what does he do? He goes home. He not only goes home, he goes home, records a message for his friends on his CD burner, leaves his house to hide the CD where they'll find it later (as opposed to, say, going to one of their houses just giving it to them -- or for that matter, staying there overnight and leaving town the next morning), and then goes back home, where he apparently twiddles his thumbs until the Blue Ribbons come for him.

Disturbing Behavior also suffers from its lack of a clearly defined antagonist. Sure, the Blue Ribbons are mean and nasty when no one's looking and beat the stuffing out of Steve a few times, but they're pretty much a faceless horde, yet not faceless enough to be frightening in their anonymity.

And while Dr. Caldicott, as the mastermind behind the brainwashing program, would seem like the logical choice of villain, he appears in only a few scenes and has very little direct conflict with Steve until the very end of the film. There's no one to root against except for a vaguely defined "them."

By and large, there's little that's good to be said about the performances in Disturbing Behavior. As Rachel, Holmes is a cipher, although much of that must be blamed on the script. We're told just about nothing on this character; we're apparently just supposed to be wowed by the fact that the chick from Dawson's Creek has a pierced nose. James Marsden is amiable, if bland, as Steve.

The only person in the cast having any fun is William Sadler, who plays the school's reclusive janitor, obsessed with getting rid of the town's problems with rats. Sadler is the only actor who appears to realize what a ludicrously bad movie he's trapped in, and goes completely over-the-top with a performance that's a welcome relief from the rest of the movie's ridiculously solemn ponderousness.

The sole virtue of Disturbing Behavior is its brevity; the film clocks in at well under an hour and a half. So if you do find yourself somehow trapped in Cradle Bay, don't worry. You won't have to stay very long.