Armageddon Review

Big action movies usually leave me quite unmoved - I`m not such a special effects fan, and action without story or character I find boring. Which is why I was amazed at myself for getting so enthusiastically into the swing of things with Armageddon. It has a similar scenario to Deep Impact - the earth is being threatened by an asteroid, this one`s the size of Texas. But the treatment and the emphasis are quite different - where Deep Impact`s focus was on the human dramas Armageddon is ultra gung-ho, which I guess is why Bruce Willis is perfect for the lead. He plays Harry S. Stamper, famous for digging the deepest holes in the world for oil. He`s a bit of a roughie, he takes potshots at Greenpeace with his driving iron and real shots at his number one man J. A. - Ben Affleck - when he finds him in bed with his daughter - Liv Tyler. It seems the answer to this latest world problem is to drill a hole in the asteroid and nuke it. Who`re you going to get to do that? You guessed it - Harry and his team. But somehow they don`t really fit into the NASA mould...I sat up close to the screen in a big cinema with big sound and let the whole thing drag me along into outer space. One thing about all those edits, they don`t let you pause for breath. The film has some terrific moments of humour - mainly through the character Rockhound played by Steve Buscemi. The Russians are maybe going to take offence at the depiction of one of their cosmonauts - played by Peter Stormare - as a bumbling idiot, but given Billy Bob Thornton`s executive director of NASA maybe the Russians won`t mind too much after all. Bruce Willis doesn`t move too many facial muscles in the film but then he`s meant to take this whole thing seriously. The romance is a bit of a fizzer, but really this is an excellent adventure, I laughed, I didn`t cry one tear, even though I suspect I was supposed to at one point, and I felt like I`d had a terrific time at the movies by the end. It`s entertainment pure and fairly simple.