I have to say that this is going to be THE movie of the summer. I’ve been to a lot of movies were the audience cheers and gets into the movie. But besides the rerelease of the Star Wars Trilogy, I have never seen a movie where people were cheering and getting into it like this.

The special effects were, of course, nothing short of amazing. And the action sequences–which were MANY–leave you on plastered against your chair, unable to move. From a special effects/action point of view the movie was awe-inspiring and surpassed everything I was expecting, and that was a lot to surpass.

What made the movie even better, though, was the writing and acting. Frankly, I didn’t expect much of either in this film. I thought it was all going to be special effects shots and action sequences. It wasn’t. The story was very well done. As everyone knows, it follows Bruce Willis, his oil drilling team which includes our boy, Ben Affleck and Live Tyler who isWillis’ daughter and Affleck’s girlfriend (and later fiance and after that….well, I don’t want to spoil it). After an amazing opening narration by thegreat Charleton Heston and shots of New York being laid to waste by small pieces of asteroid we find out that the Earth is less than 3 weeks away from being destroyed by an asteroid, and the people at NASA, headed by Billy Bob Thorton, come up with a plan to split the asteroid in two so the halves will pass by Earth. To do this, though, they need to drill 800 feet into it so they call in Willis to help them. He says he will do it, but only with his team. In dire straights, NASA agrees and we are off on one hell of an adventure.

As with most of these type of movies, each character has his ownbackground story which affects them throughout the movie. The most interesting is the Bruce Willis/Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler one. Affleck’s character insists on following his gut instinct at all times which leads him to screw up, regularly. Willis’ character isn’t one to take that kind of crap and finds himself arguing with Affleck most of the time but he still trusts him with any job. Then there is Liv Tyler. Her character is the typical daughter who is overprotected by her father, Willis. She finds herself feeling very bitter towards him for raising her around his oil drilling business and being so immature. So bitter, in fact, that she calls him by his first name. For 5 months she’s been dating Affleck and when Willis finds out he flips. He hates the fact that his daughter wants to be with another oil driller. He feels she could do much better.

Affleck, as usual, turns in an amazing performance. He did a great job playing the gun-ho action hero who will fight to the bitter end and accept any challenge that comes his way. And the first scene we see him in he is absolutely brilliant, running away from a gun-toting, pissed-off Bruce Willis. Ben was at his best, though, in the more emotional scenes with Tyler and Willis. The romance between him and Tyler was set up with next to no exposition but when you see them on screen you really believe that they are madly in love. And when he is with Willis, you can tell that under the yelling and screaming, both characters hold each other in high esteem and that there is an underlying father/son relationship between them. Ben show that he can be and action hero and still acts and make you believe that he is more than a stereotypical adventurous young guy. He did a great job of crossing over from the dramatic genre and further proves his flexibilty as an actor.

I think a scene about 5 minutes into the movie forshadows the box office brawls between the biggest movies of the summer: a dog runs to a bunch of Godzilla toys on the sidewalk and proceeds to pummel them. When all is said and done, ‘Armageddon’ proves that it can be a high budget, special effects heavy summer movie that still has a plot and acting that has the audience feeling everything from humor to fear to love. This is what sets it apart from all the summer movies so far and this is what’s going to make it the number one movie of the summer, if not the year.