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+ Most Profitable Movie of the Year: 81.48 mil. $ range
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| Three Hollywood stars look defiant in the face of total destruction on this poster from another era, for Michael Bay's Armageddon |
Armageddon is the film in which Bruce Willis (Death Wish (2018)) saves humanity from total annihilation by taking a deep core drilling gang to a meteor heading towards Earth and blowing it to pieces with an atomic bomb.
Armageddon is like an American kiss; an ecstatic mission impossible in space miraculously succeeds near the time of the millennium, when the good time 1990s were still in effect, all still relatively well in the Western world. It is written by Jonathan Hensleigh (Jumanji (1995)) and J.J. Abrams (Super 8 (2011)), with Tony Gilroy (The Great Wall (2016)), Shane Salerno (Celebrity (2000, TV movie)) and Robert Roy Pool (Outbreak (1995)) contributing, and directed by Michael Bay (The Rock (1996)).
The absurd team of unlikely worker-heroes of Armageddon include good actors like Michael Clarke Duncan (The Slammin' Salmon (2009)) and Steve Buscemi (Norman (2016)) and is led by an everyday superhero-like Willis, and they are all really cool, - on Earth. When they hit space, for maneuvers we are mostly served explosions and screaming men for a good 45 minutes, which takes it toll on a happy audience member's enthusiasm.
Armageddon is, as the trailer amply prepares you for, overly sentimental and junk in the sense that it is, strictly speaking, sheer baloney, (NASA even uses it as part of their management training program, and they have found at least 168 (!) scientific impossibilities in the film.) But it is also incredibly well-produced baloney, such as Jerry Bruckheimer-produced (Top Gun (1986)) films usually are.
So for anyone with a penchant for that unique oversimplification of the world that only a huge, American blockbuster can provide, Armageddon is a true must-see.
Related posts:
Michael Bay: 13 Hours/13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) - Bay portrays controversial recent history in generally thrilling actioner
1998 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
Top 10: Best cop movies reviewed by Film Excess to date
Bad Boys (1995) - Bay's successful buddy cop debut is still fun
Cost: 140 mil. $
Box office: 553.7 mil. $
= Box office success (returned 3.95 times its cost)
[Armageddon premiered 30 June (California) and runs 151 minutes. One story goes that a Disney production president took notes concerning Paramount's Deep Impact (1998) and devised Armageddon as a very similar counter film from Disney. Bruckheimer hired several more writers to rewrite and polish Hensleigh's original script. Shooting took place in South Dakota, Texas, including Houston, Florida, New Mexico, California, including Los Angeles, New York, Istanbul, Turkey, India, France, including Paris, China, including Shanghai and in Mexico from August 1997 - January 1998. An extra 3 mil. $ were allotted the film's budget to create special effects to distinguish it from Deep Impact. 2.6 mil. $ were spent to advertise the film at the 1998 Super Bowl. The film opened #1 to a 36 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it stayed in the top 5 for another 3 weeks (#2-#3-#5) and grossed 201.5 mil. $ (36.4 % of the total gross). It was the highest-grossing film of 1998 worldwide. It was nominated for 4 Oscars, winning none: It lost Best Sound Effects to Saving Private Ryan, Visual Effects to What Dreams May Come, Song (Diane Warren: I Don't Want to Miss a Thing) to Stephen Schwartz for When You Believe from The Prince of Egypt, and Sound, also to Saving Private Ryan. It was also nominated for a Grammy. Roger Ebert gave it a 1/4 star review, translating to three notches harder than this review. The video release surpassed Pretty Woman (1990) to become Buena Vista Home Entertainment's top-selling live-action title. Bay returned with Pearl Harbor (2001). Willis returned in The Siege (1998). Armageddon is rotten at 38 % with a 5.2/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Armageddon?
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