Bruce Willis and a host of fellow top actors fill the screen with action, adventure and drama in Armageddon that leads the pack of modern catastrophe films.
Film making 20/25
Video 20/25
Audio 23/25
Bonus Features 4/25
Total 67/100
Armageddon stars Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton and Liv Tyler with Michael Bay directing this modern day catastrophe film. In the same vein as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure Armageddon takes calamity globally with an asteroid heading toward earth.
With less than thirty days to do something a team of top scientists throw out solar sails and lasers to go with drilling an 800 foot hole to drop a nuke in on the runaway rock. Despite the world’s best scientists and engineers NASA finds out the best at drilling is the oddball team of Harry Stamper and his crew of deep core oil drillers.
After Harry and his daughter are told the truth he tells them his crew is the best and they can do it so they prepare with NASA astronauts to do the job. The crew trains for twelve days and after a quick night off, night out on the town, they jump into their flight suits and off to the asteroid to bust it wide open.
The daughter of Harry Stamper has fallen in love with Harry’s top driller who Harry thinks of as his son and even the antics of hardcore roughnecks can’t top going into space. When they finally arrive on the asteroid they have a tough job of drilling through iron ferrite as their ship missed the designated landing area.
NASA sends up two ships, redundancy in case of accidents as a backup, but one doesn’t make the landing in one piece and a few smaller asteroids hitting Earth highlight some of the better scenes in Armageddon before the big event. The film has all you could want with well placed humor, great special effects and even a sexy woman in Liv Tyler and hot young Ben Affleck who are hot for each other and have no compunctions about showing it.
Armageddon has that magical touch of actors who know their jobs and do really well as well as click with each other, a story good enough to make that cheesy tale believable and great special effects to make a really good film. Several films tried to beat Armageddon to release as well as to the box office ticket sales but this was the main event in my opinion.
The film was really good and I liked the use of special effects even if several of the theories behind some could have a horse thrown through the holes in them. The film has all those aspects that make good catastrophe and monster movies so you can watch them over and over again and enjoy them more each time.
Armageddon on Blu-ray includes the main film in high definition with great looking color and very well done audio in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound. The video transfer is great and about the best you’re going to get from a 12 year old film that did not have any idea Blu-ray was coming soon.
Audio is also well done and as usual for films the better technically from video and audio so you have great video and audio along with a well made film but almost no extras. There is a music video from Aerosmith, I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing, and a couple of trailers but nothing else for bonus content on the Blu-ray edition.
Armageddon on Blu-ray takes a really good film, not excellent or great but really good and polishes it till it shines bright and gives this as an alternate if you have never purchased it before. I highly recommend checking out the Blu-ray edition of Armageddon if you don’t already own it for its better quality video and audio.
