Armageddon – 1998
This was a really stupid movie with some pretty decent visual effects. Director Michael Bay has gotten himself a reputation for making movies in which there are exciting action sequences with high-speed chases, and a lot of things getting blown up. There were all the Transformer movies, The Island, Pearl Harbor, and the Bad Boys films. But Armageddon was one of his early efforts and I can see why his reputation was earned.
Another common trait of his directing style is the use of quick cuts that are often more confusing than effective as a story-telling technique. A fast-paced action sequence ends, and you are left wondering what exactly just happened. I learned that Michael Bay got his start as a director in filming commercials and music videos. In those mediums, the goal is to get as much information about a product onto the screen in the shortest and most direct way possible. So in light of that, his hyper-fast pacing that breezes through story and character development in order to make way for the action sequences makes a certain amount of sense.
In this movie where a planet-killer meteor the size of the state of Texas is on a collision-course with Earth, there were two main things that took up the bulk of the special effects. First, there were the meteor showers that assaulted New York, Shanghai, and Paris with amazing accuracy. Even though most of the earth’s surface is covered with water, only these three major cities got hit.
But for all that, the destruction of these cities was impressively done. From what I’ve read, the effects were mostly accomplished through the clever blend of scale models and CGI. One of the coolest icons to be taken out was the Chrysler Building, which was cut in two by a meteor so that the top half of the structure crashed to the ground in a fiery explosion. In Paris, I wanted to see the Eiffel tower get a similar treatment, but this one only had a gigantic impact with an expanding radius of destruction.
The rest of the effects took place in outer-space. Two space shuttles were sent up to land a team of oil drillers on the monster meteor, drill into the structure, and then drop a nuclear warhead into the shaft. The result was that the meteor broke in two and each piece sheared off to either side of the Earth, missing us by a narrow margin. Could a single nuclear blast break the entire state of Texas in half? I don’t know, but it stretches believability a bit for me.
And then there were the sequences in which the shuttles were flying through space with the maneuverability of fighter jets in the Earth’s atmosphere. Nope, I’m not buying that one either. You can have the best visual effects ever, but if your story takes place in the real world, and you blatantly ignore common physics to this degree, then the illusion has failed. Did they look great? Sure. Were they believable? Not in the slightest. But I guess Michael Bay never claimed that this action movie was scientifically accurate, did he?