Armageddon

I watched the movie “Armageddon few nights ago… it wasn’t the first time I had seen it. Indeed, if you have HBO or any of the other movie channels, it is tough to not be able to find it playing on any given night of the week.

Have any of you seen this movie? It is an action adventure movie that masquerades as a chick flick/love story… or maybe it is the other way around.

The premise is that an asteroid is hurtling through space towards earth, and it is so large the just throwing nuclear weapons at it to destroy it won’t work. The only thing that will save the planet is to blow it up from the inside. Still with me? This is classic end-of-the-world disaster stuff!

Enter Harry Stamper, played by Bruce Willis, and his misfit crew of hard living, hard drinking, social deviant, roughneck oil drillers. Harry and his crew are selected to go into space, get fuel for their space shuttles at the Russian Space Station, land on the asteroid, drill down to 800 feet, plant an atomic weapon there, fly away from the asteroid, and remotely detonate the bomb. Earth is saved.

Now, get this, while refueling their space ships, there is a fire in the Russian space station. No one is killed, but the American crews have to take the Russian cosmonaut with them. The Russian cosmonaut is played by Peter Stomares, a Swedish actor that some of you might remember from those very funny (at least to me) VW Jetta commercials that you see from time to time.

Well, to make a long story short, the whole thing is a success, but about half of the people that went into space to accomplish the mission are killed before the asteroid is gloriously destroyed by Harry, who has to detonate the nuke manually.

Now, I realize that this movie is kinda hokey… indeed it is designed to satisfy a man’s enjoyment of the “blow-shit-up, male-bonding” movie genre. It has space ships, guns, explosions, strippers, nuclear weapons, Paris being destroyed by a meteor strike, strippers, and Liv Tyler showing a little skin. What’s not to like? There is even a scene where a n’er do well Dad (who is now a hero) reunited with his son, if you need something to get teary-eyed over. And strippers.

Oh, did I mention that the movie closes with Aerosmith singing “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing”?

Good fun.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about the Soccer mom that pissed me off this weekend.