RNeary

It's beyond my conception how anybody who's actually seen this movie could assert that it "glorifies" anything. I suspect that most of the comments on the board that allege this are actually from people who haven't seen the film. They must have missed the scene in which one of the men's mothers screams in despair when she realizes what her son has decided to do. That doesn't strike me as a successful ending for propaganda.

I'm an American gentile who's favorable inclined toward Israel, and if I were magically transported into the movie, had a gun, and knew what the characters had in mind, I'd be compelled to shoot them. That doesn't mean I think there's no shred of justice in their cause, or wouldn't regard the necessity of stopping them as a tragic waste of two potentially worthwhile young lives. It's only to point out once again the ambiguity of the reactions legitimately evoked by the film, which previous writers have ably discussed.

A lot of the people who are asserting that "violence doesn't settle anything" in this discussion are writing from the United States. Evidently they don't know their own history.

Interesting, albeit minor genre war film, which Steve McQueen carries on his back. He plays a latent sociopath who takes command of an isolated squad (with disastrous results) through sheer force of will, when the noncom in charge is killed. It's a chilling, totally convincing performance. The most provocative aspect is the way in which McQueen's GI relates to everybody else in the film - he's the only character who has no conceivable function in any peacetime world. Care is taken to give the men around him some civilian values - Bobby Darin is an urban scrounger; Mike Kellin thinks of his wife in a moment of extremity; Harry Guardino shows reverence in a bombed-out church; Bob Newhart (in a role which is in every other aspect absurd) isn't really a soldier at all. McQueen's character alone is left a cipher, a blank page for the actor to complete.

Probably not the worst piece of crud I've ever seen, but absolutely the loudest, and, given the high budget, the dumbest. (I've seen sf pictures costing fifty thousand dollars that were tighter, smarter, better and more convincing.)

This picture is a timeless tribute to sheer idiocy. We laugh at many of the dumber science fiction flicks of the Fifties on Mystery Science Theater 3000, as if somehow we've evolved beyond them, become superior, in the last forty years; but give ARMAGEDDON special effects from 1958, and it would be as absurd as ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN.

We all know that movies sometimes stretch logic in order to accomplish what the writers want; but usually when this happens, it's a last resort, and the picture feels sort of apologetic about it. ARMAGEDDON, however, makes it the only resort. It positively lurches out of its way to turn logic into road kill.

Why is it necessary to show a pointless two-second shot of jet pilots scrambling across a runway, a la TOP GUN? Everybody in the audience knows the country isn't under enemy attack. In general, why is it necessary to see three quick shots of everything, when two longer ones would do as well? As Pauline Kael said about 1941, it's like having your head stuck in a pinball machine for two and a half hours, and it gets damn tiring.

Why is it necessary to have the two space shuttles take off about two hundred feet apart? Wasn't anybody in the movie's version of NASA familiar with the rather large fireball generated by Challenger? Have that happen to one of these ships on liftoff, and there goes the world. And why do the shuttles seem to fly within each other's exhaust wash half the time? Would the movie really have been less exciting if it had been fifty percent smarter and fifty minutes shorter?

I can't buy the argument that we should excuse all the sloppiness here, because it's "only" an action film. Movies like AIR FORCE ONE, CRIMSON TIDE, THE TERMINATOR and STARSHIP TROOPERS prove it's always possible to grip an audience by the throat, without cutting off the air supply to the brain - but first you have to have talent.