I’m not a Michael Bay fan, but I do have a little dib-dab of affection for any director who annoys every film critic on Earth and yet still scores huge hits every time. When critics are powerless, it’s always interesting to me. Not saying it’s good, not saying it’s bad—just that the subject is a bone with some meat on it.
As a person who’s only seen two Michael Bay movies (both from the 90s), I’m not the perfect person to chew on that meat, but I did watch Armageddon because it’s on Netflix, I’d never seen it before, it’s June and I was in the mood for a little summer blockbuster action, even if it’s from nearly twenty summers ago. Whatever. Aside from the flatscreen, my living room looks like it’s from twenty summers ago, too. So, I got a beer out of the fridge, left my brain on the kitchen counter, sank into the couch and fired up the home theater to watch Bruce Willis save the world from an approaching meteor.
Searching for nice things to say about this dumbbell film, I can’t say that Bay doesn’t know what he’s doing. He handles the scenario like a professional ad photographer shoots the new McDonald’s Double Cholesterol Burger. The lettuce looks crispy, the bun fluffy, the meat juicy and the cheese quite the taste sensation. He doesn’t want to give you anything to think about, just something to consume. Sounds like the quintessential summer blockbuster to me. All of the crowd-pleasing elements are here. Action. Comedy. A love story. The major characters are all “the best” and “don’t know how to fail”. It’s got frantic scenes in military bases and at NASA headquarters. It’s got working class know-how that trumps the methods of an out-of-touch government. It’s got redemption for everyone and plenty jerkin’ of the tears.
Some people hate that stuff, but Bay really goes for it. As a piece of screenwriting and directing with its eye on conquering the box office, it’s airtight. Nothing about it has aged over twenty years, which is as much a statement about the film as it is about how deeply set in stone the blockbuster formula has become, to the point that movies like this don’t even acquire extra character across two decades. The scenes of major cities being half-destroyed by falling space rocks look exactly like the scenes of major cities being half-destroyed in every superhero movie today. Even the effects are on near the same level.
The bad stuff: If I had to put down Michael Bay in one sentence, I’d say that he’s the kind of director who mounts grand productions with top-dollar effects and big chords struck in the character moments—and then he has the bad taste to score it with recent Aerosmith ballads. That about says it all.
The neutral stuff: Like the even more dumb Independence Day, this is just a 1950s sci-fi scenario inflated with a Hollywood mega-budget and with different emphasis. In the 50s, these films would bombard you with science talk and offer characters who were pure cardboard. Bay takes the opposite approach. There’s a lot of science talk here, but it flies by faster than the gaffer’s name in the closing credits. The science is all texture, not the substance. In fact, this movie explicitly rejects scientists (always the heroes in the sci-fi flicks of old) and says that the only ones who can save the world are a pack of blue collar oil drillers, a rogue’s gallery of the type of guys who get into fights in sports bars. As they bumble their way through accelerated astronaut training and evaluations at NASA, we’re supposed think they’re real laugh riots (shades of Stripes in those scenes), though the only one I like much is Steve Buscemi as the slightly psychotic genius scholar who prefers the oil rig to academia, goes up into space fully expecting to die and succumbs to “space dementia” (?).
In the end, maybe the worst thing about this movie is that it’s a solid TWO-AND-A-HALF-FUCKING HOURS LONG. Why do they do this to us? I just did a quick Wikipedia flip-through of the Michael Bay oeuvre and ALL of his movies are like that! Bad Boys II is longer than Goodfellas. There’s a Transformers sequel that goes on for almost three hours. Holy moly, Jesus and Mary.
Maybe that’s Bay’s big middle-finger to his critics, though. They give him bad reviews; he gives them a headache and a numb ass.