WTF China?!?: Armageddon (1999)

No Bruce Willis in sight.  On the plus side, there's no Ben Affleck in sight either!  Today's film is Armageddon, a Chinese import film that was supposed to be covered earlier.  Well, it wasn't.  It does qualify for this week too, so that's where we are.  The film is about the end of the world as we know it and I feel...bored.  What's wrong with this movie?  I'll get into that in a bit, but first, let me tell you what it's about.  Basically, a bunch of scientists die in dramatic fashion and the governments of the world investigate it.  What is the big secret behind these attacks?  It's sillier than you could probably imagine.  The problem with the movie is that it's really boring.  To find out how such a great premise crashes and burns so dramatically, read on...

A bunch of scientists are seemingly-attacked.  How do they die?  Well...

It's Spontaneous Human Combustion!  Apparently this guy drank a lot of Gasoline in the morning too.

So what's the problem?  Well, this dramatic stuff makes up the first ten minutes of so.  After that...

It switches to focusing on this Scientist- who's related to the dead ones- who is wracked with guilt over his girlfriend's death.  Cue 8,001 flashback scenes!

As a bonus, the next forty-odd minutes are made up of those scenes and stuff like this...

Yes, they derail all of the momentum set up by the intro with the worst pacing shift that I've ever seen!  Wake me in an hour!

Sparing you a lot of time and tedium, they find out that the man behind the attacks is this white guy.  Damn you, Not Eric Stoltz!

Here's the twist: he's God.  No, really.

In the End, he tests out heroes and decides to not destroy.  I'm too bored to even explain how this makes sense.  The End.

Every day, movies find new ways to disappoint me.  Would you guess that a film about scientists being killed via Spontaneous Combustion could be this boring?  All I can figure is that they wanted to make this film about a man mourning his dead girlfriend and interacting with his friend, but had to spice it up to sell the movie.  If so, what a terrible idea!  If not, what the hell was the point of this movie?  They took a cool idea and bogged it down with boring, boring material.  If you can't sleep and happen to have a copy of this lying around, you're in luck.  Otherwise, skip this film or just leave it in your queue for 9 months like I did.  Take us away, giant Mario 64 game...

Next up, Steven Seagal returns for another round of thrashing.  Can he take down evil drug lord...Eddie Griffin?  Stay tuned...