![]() ![]() You wouldn't criticize Star Tours or Batman: The Ride for shoddy characterization or wooden acting, and it doesn't seem fair to me to treat movies like Armageddon as though their writers and directors had the same goals as, say, Tarkovsky. Janet Maslin, for example, wrote, " Armageddon tries to tell a coherent story of guts, young love and space travel." But I don't think it does try it's not really interested. ![]() Too bad it didn't work out that way.Critics who thought Armageddon was a sort of terminal end point for filmmaking (which is to say, all of them except David Edelstein, as far as I can tell) missed the point. The men and women who worked on the film were certain that they were living at the end of history. Watching it now, you see so many scenes that simply could not be made today, or even conceived of, and for me that made rewatching it oddly poignant. There's a reason that The Onion namechecked producer Jerry Bruckheimer when they wrote this, and Armageddon is his masterpiece. The destruction of American cities is no longer a guilt-free pleasure. The closest thing to Armageddon this summer was War of the Worlds, which is a much more thoughtful movie. #Nowhere to run contraption maker movie#This sort of disaster movie is still around, but it's evolved a lot in the last seven years. #Nowhere to run contraption maker full#Here they are in full The Right Stuff-hero-mode (which is the only mode they've got):Īrmageddon exemplifies a certain type of movie the big, dumb, loud, critic-proof summer blockbuster. If you're one of the three people who didn't see it, it was pitched as "Red Adair in space," and later as " The Dirty Dozen in space." The basic story (and it is the most basic of stories) is that a gigantic asteroid is on a collision course with earth, and NASA sends a group of twelve oil-drillers into space to plant a nuclear bomb that will destroy the asteroid and save the planet. Abrams, adaptation by Tony Gilroy and Shane Salerno, story by Robert Roy Pool and Jonathan Hensleigh (I have no idea what work those writing credits actually correspond to).Īrmageddon seems like an odd choice for a Criterion edition, but if the collection is intended to provide a representative sample of film throughout history, neglecting the late-90's studio system would be silly. Armageddon, 1998, directed by Michael Bay, screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh and J. ![]()
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