Armageddon is... fuck, I LOVE MICHAEL BAY
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https://blenderdumbass.org/reviews?page=2 : 👁 1
https://blenderdumbass.org/reviews/lucy_2014_pretentious_or_profound__ : 👁 1
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
It is rumored that Michael Bay's Armageddon is shown periodically at NASA to the people working there as a test of how much inaccuracies they can spot. The movie is fucking stupid if you want to think about anything remotely realistic. The science... what science? The film has never heard of it. The characters are fucking degenerates. The lack of tone is only rivaled by Nicolas Winding Refn interviews. And yet somehow I cannot find myself hating on this movie. ↩ Reply
Have you ever known that Michael Bay was not the only infamously crazy film-maker working on this project? J. J. Abrams ( the guy infamous for jerking off the audience with lens flares, which I really enjoy ) is one of the screen-writers on the movie. There were like 8 other writes helping him, though. ↩ Reply
So how's the script? Well, the script is bad-shit-crazy. We all know Armageddon. It is a love story between A.J. ( Ben Affleck ), Grace ( Liv Tyler ) and the cookie-cracker animals. We all know the asteroid. We all know the way Michael Bay would deal with the asteroid. Either in film or in the real life, he would do exactly the same thing. Insert a video from that interview Michael Bay did in 2017 ( about Transformers 5 ) where he randomly got distracted by a car, saying "I want to blow up this car.". ↩ Reply
In a weird way, Armageddon was probably supposed to be a Roland Emmerich picture. His filmography consists of various disaster flicks. So that would be a cool match for him. Yet, producer Jerry Bruckheimer had a masterful business decision to hire Michael Bay for this. Which payed off in every way imaginable. Bay is such bad-shit-crazy sonsofbitch that instead of a generic heroic Emmerichesque disaster flick, we got a gut-puching Bayhem! explosion of a movie. ↩ Reply
Michael Bay is fucking good in a few very important for such a picture aspects. He knows how to compose a shot. His camera is always positioned to capture something gorgeous. I remember as a kid I was flipping through channels, trying to find a movie I wanted to watch on TV. And suddenly there was this majestic image. Bruce Willis is playing golf in a silhouette. I remember thinking how much better this movie looks than anything else ever. Even the less good looking stuff in this movie, still looks fantastic. And the person responsible for this is Michael Bay. ↩ Reply
Michael Bay also is very good at manipulating audience emotions. He wants tension. He gets it. He wants you to cry. He makes you cry. Non of it usually makes a whole lot of sense in the end of the day ( in this movie at least ) but in the moment, all those tricks he has up his sleeve are profoundly gut-punching. Too bad, most of the time ( in this movie at least ) what he wants you to feel is something along the lines of comedic-intensity. This whole movie is comedic-intensity, the movie. With occasional breaks to cry. ↩ Reply
I would not say that I enjoy Armageddon all the way through. It has issues. For example, I don't like the ending too much. There could be a better way to pay off the self-sacrifice thing in the end. Instead there is immediately a new tension build-up with the engines not starting. Also at this stage, Michael Bay still didn't perfect his flow. So a lot of the scene transitions are a bit rough. He does that way better in later films. ↩ Reply
The CGI in the film, while aged a lot, still works, due to Bay's direction of it. It is so over the top, and bad-shit-crazy, and every shot is composed and directed to be this most amazing moment ever, that even though the rendering is not the best, the concept of every shot, the movement, the composition, the light, the color, everything but the rendering, is still top notch, if you let it be what it is. Those shuttle shots are not particularly realistic. They fly way too close to one another. They do too much crazy maneuvering. But it looks cool. And the limited rendering tech of the time doesn't make it look less cool. ↩ Reply
With all the flows and stupidities, I still very much enjoy Armageddon. And as pretty much with every Michael Bay movie I watch I always feel the same thing: I LOVE MICHAEL BAY!!! ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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