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Monday, August 28, 2006

Armageddon

I made really good progress on novella revisions yesterday and I thought I had all the heavy stuff done, but something I thought wouldn't take too much work may end up needing to be rewritten. :-( If you detect a lack of enthusiasm in my voice, it's because I'm not thrilled by the prospect. Not because of the work involved, that doesn't bother me, it's because I really like the scene the way it's written. I mean, really, really, really like it. And it looks like human nature is going to make me have to change it. The trick is going to be keeping the dialogue and stuff that I like and still fix the thing. :-(

After working all day, I watched Armageddon. I know, I'm probably the last person in America to see this movie. Does anyone need a summary of what happens? Probably not, but just in case a large asteroid is headed for Earth. If it strikes, all life will cease to exist. NASA needs to send a team to the monster to drill 800 feet down and drop a nuke and they end up sending a team of deep sea oil drillers to get the job done. These guys are misfits and screwups and clash with the military.

I thought the movie was good, very suspenseful, and at 2.5 hours, about a half an hour too long. Maybe if they'd cut out some of the training stuff or something. I'd have liked to have seen more of the romance between AJ and Grace, but then there's a reason why I write what I do. I'm very interested in relationships.

It was interesting how the scriptwriters kept making things worse and worse and worse for these poor drillers once they were in space. I mean everything went wrong that could possibly go wrong. It did up the tension, but after a while, even while I was on the edge of my seat, part of me was thinking, oh, come on!

My favorite line in the whole movie was spoken by the Russian. It was something like: Components. American components. Russian components. All made in Taiwan.

There were also some huge problems with the logic in the movie. Some of the space stuff was wrong, at least I'm pretty sure it was wrong. I don't think you can have explosive decompression in space. I decided to overlook all the nitpicky details, though, and just go along for the ride. It was a pretty fun one.

My overall rating 4 out of 5 stars.