Pained by ‘Armageddon’s’ Jagged Edges

It’s curious how Jerry Bruckheimer could mistake an audience expressing its dismay over “Armageddon’s” excessively caffeinated editing as enthusiasm for “the emotion of the movie and the story” (“ ‘Armageddon’ Draws Cutting Commentary,” by Jon Burlingame, July 7). But if your only goal is to rev up audiences into a frenzy of agitation (excitement?) over an orgy of images slammed together hyperactively, I suppose the confusion is understandable.

Director Michael Bay’s editing “style” exists simply to create a false sense of intense activity and momentum, to hide the fact that he and other MTV-inspired filmmakers haven’t a clue how to tell a story designed to move an audience without all that flash and thunder. If Bruckheimer is right that Bay uses lots of setups of “real interesting shots” that require lots of cuts to cram them all in, then why not show a little discipline? Why not delete some of the less “interesting” ones and slow things down a bit so we can at least register what it is that’s supposed to be so interesting?

Because Bay, Bruckheimer and their ilk know that if they did, it would become even more readily apparent that the emperors have no movie. They’re still hiding behind that wheezy old dictum of giving an audience what it wants. But “Armageddon” hasn’t a single image of any staying power derived from the filmmaker’s passion to tell a coherent story. Instead of exhilaration, I felt like I’d sat close up to a strobe light on a busy airport tarmac for 2 1/2 hours.

Luckily I saw “Out of Sight” the next day. It reminded me what can be done by people who care more for the art of storytelling than for strutting the latest technology in service of an asinine idea, and it tempered some of my fear that “Armageddon” might indeed be signaling the end of the world, as far as narrative filmmaking goes.

DENNIS COZZALIO

Glendale

*

Making a lot of cuts to use all of a director’s setups is poor filmmaking because it distrusts the story’s (and actors’) ability to hold an audience’s attention. If filmmakers do not have the confidence to pick the best two to four angles to cover a scene, then they are wasting the studio’s time and money, as well as the audience’s patience.

I believe the general public’s understanding of the language of film is much more refined than producer Jerry Bruckheimer seems to think, at all ages. There are plenty of well-cut action films (James Cameron’s, George Miller’s) that maintain a sense of filmic geography, allowing time for an audience to appreciate what is happening, as well as how a character feels about it.

JOSEPH PLONSKY

Los Angeles

*

You would think that after spending $147 million, the makers of “Armageddon” would have figured out that portraying Indians praying at the Taj Mahal is like Americans praying at the Washington Monument.

NANCY CHAND

Culver City

*

Now wait a minute! The astronomers for “Armageddon” have just discovered a Texas-sized (about 600 miles across) asteroid that is due to smash into the Earth in 18 days? At six miles a second, and even if its albedo was a mere 3%, this thing should have been brighter than Saturn by this stage. Was someone asleep at the telescope?

And now they’re going to blow it up by drilling a hole 800 feet into it and setting off a bomb? Well, it had better be a pretty big bomb!

This object, after all, has not only rock-hardness but gravity. Based on the promo literature, I figure it’s about 500 quadrillion tons and should have an escape velocity of about 400 meters a second. (How it has stayed cinematically jagged instead of forming into a sphere is one of the mysteries of Hollywood science.) In order to blow this thing up, they have to not only shatter it but also overcome its gravitational force sufficiently to disperse it (hopefully not too much of it going toward Earth).

I figure this would take about 70 septillion joules of energy, which is roughly equivalent to that in 1.4 billion 10-megaton hydrogen bombs. Or the job could be done with a single hydrogen bomb, which would be somewhere in the range of half a mile in diameter.

Is this how they do it? Or does the indomitable human spirit overcome all?

ROY F. MALAHOWSKI

Bakersfield

*

Why should Kenneth Turan be surprised or perplexed that “Armageddon” should need “so many [five] writers”? Aren’t bad movies just like accidents? The worse they are, the more attention they need.

KEN MARCUS

Los Angeles