Armageddon
Lauren Campbell
ENG225: Introduction to Film (GSK1307D)
Instructor: Fawn vonFrohling
March 4, 2013
Armageddon
For the final film critique in this course, I have chosen the American film Armageddon. Armageddon was released to the American populous in 1998. The film was directed by Michael Bay, and written by J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Hensleigh. While there were a number of high-profile actors in this film, the major players for this movie were Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thorton, Ben Affleck, and Liv Tyler. (Imdb, 2008). Armageddon was an American disaster film that was poorly written from the start and even more poorly executed on screen. While I am a fan of Bruce Willis, I was extremely disappointed with this film as a whole.
The success or failure of a film begins with the writers of the story. (Goodykoontz & Jacobs, 2011). Armageddon seems to have been haphazardly tossed together by writers, replacing scientific facts with quick one-liners fired off by the actors of this film at every turn. One example of inaccurate science in this film is in the plot of the story itself. An asteroid the size of Texas is hurdling through space towards Earth, and promises to end life on the planet as we know it. The plan of NASA is to send a group of oil drillers to the rock and blow it in half so the remaining debris will pass Earth all together. The drillers must land on the asteroid, drill an 800-foot hole, drop a bomb into the hole, and detonate it. “To put this in perspective, consider the following analogy. An 800-foot hole in a 300-mile-sized asteroid is like a pin-sized hole no deeper than a scratch in a ten-foot rock. Scaling things down to life size, the explosion of a hydrogen bomb would roughly be like lighting a match. Can the ignition of such a match split a ten-foot rock?” (Jupiter Scientific, 2008, para.10). Clearly, simple logic was overlooked while writing this film.
Along with sub-par writing comes the less than stellar...