He tries very rarely nowadays, but Vin Diesel is actually a good actor - somewhat limited in range, but really charismatic and of course, skilled at using that gravel-in-a-cement-mixer voice.

Hanks gives a hauntingly brilliant perfromance, but the cast is really a Murderer’s Row from top to bottom, especially Ed Burns and, of all people, Vin Diesel. 

As is de rigour with just about every Spielberg film, if he were to excise the last ten minutes, it’d be perfect. But no... He has to get the schmaltz in.

Armageddon is a movie I absolutely hated as a teenager when it came out and really didn’t enjoy.

I have that issue with “Private Ryan” and anti-war movies in general. And it may be a paradox. The opening scene was presented as an unbearable realistic depiction of a war scene. But people loved it. It keeps being rewatched on purpose. Videogames rushed to emulate it. In a way it was judged awesome to behold.…

The correct way is to:

I think your overall assessment is thoughtful, but I also think you sell Jeff Goldblum’s work here short. But I’ve always had a softer spot for an oddball character actor selling goofy dialogue at the exact needed pitch than the kind of wisecracking movie-star glamour Smith represents — though he IS quite good here,…

I remember seeing this on opening night with my teenage friends. One of us was so excited that he literally broke his theater seat rocking back and forth so hard through all of the action scenes.

What I remember the most was how the atmosphere moved around the ships as they first came into the planet. Seeing the clouds boil and shift from the enormity of the saucers was the first time I ever really felt the weight of a ship like that in a movie.

I think I’m the only person in the world who can’t stand this movie.

I love the original trilogy. 2 and 3 are weaker than the first one for obvious reasons but are both an absolute blast from start to finish.

Tin Toy himself looks pretty damn good even even if that baby looks...well, what could they do?

Johnson writing a script that killed the main villain and weakened the secondary villains. THAT was the killer for IX and I bet that was what Trevorrow and Jack Thorne struggled with.

Johnson writing a script that killed the main villain and weakened the secondary villains. THAT was the killer for IX and I bet that was what Trevorrow and Jack Thorne struggled with.

JJ, is that you? Your comments show a staggering lack of vision and imagination and are plain idiotic.

You are not part of the solution you are part of the problem.

it was something that could be accessed by potentially anybody who was willing to learn its ways, and not some elitist hereditary thing.

You’re skipping over the fact that Michael Arndt was the original writer of Episode VII and worked on his script for, what, a year?

Oh, jeez, once again blame Johnson. He inherited all those Abrams “mystery boxes” and did a pretty good job dealing with them. He told a middle story that actually had surprises. He set the entire franchise up to have a future (which Abrams then threw away again). There are plenty of problems with all three of the…

He can sing. He probably also shows up to work on time and doesn’t cause unnecessary drama.