Armageddon (1998)

Film of 2012 #50

The Michael Bay asteroid movie, written by J J Abrams and starring Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Steve Buscemi and William Fichtner, A massive asteroid is heading towards the earth and the best plan is to send a band of unfit oil drillers up on two shuttles to drill and drop a Nuclear bomb. Now the science behind this film is ridiculous and is in no way plausible at all. It is however a roller coaster ride of emotions and action and does tug on your emotions and is really a paint by numbers emotion roller-coast trying to get a gut reaction from you.

The characters are very basic and for a long film they really do not focus on the characters that much, there are some nice touches but some that are ridiculous, like the kid remembering the salesman when he appears on TV. But to the meat of this film and what Michael Bay likes the most....Special Effects now he knows these and he gets them right this film is visually stunning and beautiful to look at. The set pieces especially when the mini asteroids hit are stunning and I found them very believable. The set pieces on the Asteroid itself whether they are plausible or not you do feel the tension of the situation and everybody knows how this film as a Summer blockbuster is going to end you don't know who is going to survive.

This is an enjoyable romp however if you have not seen it yet then you probably do not need to see it, I will re-watch it when I need some easy watching guff. This is a 3 star worth seeing for the visual effects but overall it really does not need to be seen in any real sense.

Transformers 3:Dark of the Moon (2011)

So I watched the 3rd Transformers film even though the first 2 were nothing special or appealing and now there was no Megan Fox to look at, even though as an actress she was nothing special I have to be honest and say I think she looks good. Shia Le Beuf is back and I did like the fact that he was not ensconced in the heart of Military Intelligence and they did try to play it a little real, however let us remember that this series of films are about giant robots that are from space and they fight each other, this is not based in realism so the fact that they bother trying to develop this when in the last hour they forget anything like development when the robots are fighting.

Michael Bay does not seem to live in any form of reality when it comes to making movies and apart from the fact that these films take so much money he should not be allowed to make films. Transformers 3 is about an hour too long, there is a scene at the end when I am like what happened there it is like I missed 5 minutes, must have dozed off, and really in a film about robots changing into cars and fighting why was I so bored?

There is very little actually any good about this film, fair enough the effects are as always awesome and I can believe that the robots are there but the characters, I do not care and actually I was hoping that they would fail. They introduce random Autobots never seen before so they can die and there are racist stereotypes abound and why have a fat waddling Robot, who designs a robot to be fat and cumbersome? This is barely worthy of the 1 star and I would avoid this at all costs, it is not worth the time it takes to watch it.

Friday the 13th Remake (2009)

So Michael Bay decided to remake one of the most famous horror films, and he sucked at it. This is a major disappointment apart from the fact that it is a remake, why not just continue the series, there has been no continuity so far so why not just ignore from 3 or from 7, whatever he chooses but they decided to remake the original. Now this is more an amalgamation of the first 3 films apart from the fact that they have Jason break his MO by taking a prisoner and they have a story about someone searching for the captive person.

They looked at the franchise and decided that it was all very silly so they decided to make it up as they went a long and they could of actually done a lot with the set up and the characters but decided to ignore it all and they made a slasher film that sort of paid homage to the 80's classics in a modern setting.

This film is not okay it would be fine if it was not linked to the Friday 13th Series and would probably be 3 stars but as a remake it only gets 1 star as it does nothing new for the franchise and should only be watched as part of the marathon, my recommendation though is do not watch it last as it will leave a bitter taste from the series.