Armageddon

'Waiting for Armageddon' MPAA rating: Unrated Running time: 1 hour, 14 minutes Playing: At the Downtown Independent, Los Angeles

In the 1998 movie "Armageddon," Bruce Willis plays an oil-drilling platform engineer who leads a team that lands on an asteroid aimed at Earth, drills a hole into its center and explodes a nuclear device that splits the asteroid, saving the planet. Could it actually happen? Definitely not, say physics graduate students at the University of Leicester in England. Leaving aside the question of whether we have spacecraft that could transport the drilling team to intercept the asteroid, the group of four students concluded that we simply don't have a big enough bomb to split the asteroid so that the two halves would pass by the Earth.

In "Armageddon Outta Here," a musical fantasy at the Whitefire, God is known as Doug. Spell God backward, see, and you get . . . Well, it might not be very precise but then nothing in this show is. Doug is a devilish-looking fellow who challenges a dentist named Jimmy Dagwood (Derek McGrath) to give him three good reasons why he shouldn't destroy the world.

Armageddon is about to get unprecedented amounts of TV airtime. In the coming months, network and cable channels will use doomsday as a hook to draw viewers to end-times-themed reality competitions, action thrillers, comic-book adaptations and docu-dramas. Blame the Mayans, or mangled interpretations of their hieroglyphics, for the reenergized fascination with the apocalypse, which some 15% of the global population believes could come on Dec. 21, according to a recent Reuters poll.

Re "Gov. Warns of 'Armageddon Cuts,' " Jan. 21: What a neat trick -- by dumping budget decisions in the laps of voters, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has absolved himself of any responsibility for fixing California's deficit. Should voters reject Propositions 57 and 58, the doomsday scenario he paints would be our fault, not his. Such a passive-aggressive tack seems strange from a man so attentive to his image of "take charge" hypermasculinity. Then again, Republicans have long trafficked in hysteria -- fear of communism, crime, homosexuality, etc. -- to justify their platforms.

A Is for Armageddon A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It Richard Horne Harper: 272 pp., $19.99 paper After reading Richard Horne's "A Is for Armageddon," there's an obvious question to ask this New Year's weekend (besides how to get rid of a doozy of a hangover): Why bother making any resolutions this year? Life on Earth could end tomorrow ? or today, for that matter ? thanks to any of a gallery of horrors served up by the universe or produced by ourselves.

My question to "Armageddon" screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh is not why he chose to throw up in his car after the person "very prominently affiliated" with the film "Armageddon" said to him, "Yeah, wasn't it cool the way the [plane hitting the building was similar to] the asteroids hitting the buildings in 'Armageddon'" ("Rethinking Their Life's Work," Dec. 23). Rather, why didn't Mr. Hensleigh simply vomit directly in this miscreant's face? CHRISTOPHER DILL Los Angeles

It's time we realized something about moralizers who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, especially those who have any influence on national policy. The Bible predicts Armageddon; the moralizers expect Armageddon; and it appears that many of them are doing everything they can to assure the world's destruction, to fulfill the prophecy. This includes Cal Thomas (as reflected in his offensive and infantile column) Jerry Falwell, Caspar Weinberger and Ronald Reagan.

The question July 12: Critics of "Armageddon" are complaining about the film editors' "machine-gun cutting." So which scenes, from any movie, would you have left on the cutting-room floor? In "Jurassic Park," I'd eliminate the scenes where the computer operator smokes. The inclusion of smoking in this children's movie was totally superfluous.

In his review of John F. Walvoord's "Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis" (March 10), Charles Solomon states that Walvoord predicts an imminent conflict in the Middle East involving millions of men. In my opinion, however, Walvoord is careful to point out that the Middle East is the battleground on the road to Armageddon and that "Armageddon is ahead in God's calendar of future events." As Walvoord makes clear, biblical scholars may not know for certain just when these end-time battles will take place, but the existing signs of the times suggest that the desperate struggles will take place in our future years, possibly the early years of the 21st Century.

A Is for Armageddon A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It Richard Horne Harper: 272 pp., $19.99 paper After reading Richard Horne's "A Is for Armageddon," there's an obvious question to ask this New Year's weekend (besides how to get rid of a doozy of a hangover): Why bother making any resolutions this year? Life on Earth could end tomorrow ? or today, for that matter ? thanks to any of a gallery of horrors served up by the universe or produced by ourselves.

Itake it personally: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the "Zionist regime," by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable him to bring this about. The Jews of Europe (and Poles, Russians, Czechs, the French, etc.) should likewise have taken personally Adolf Hitler's threats and his serial defiance of the international community from 1933 to 1939.

With his healthcare overhaul now enshrined in law, President Obama warned Republicans Thursday that any attempt to repeal the measure would backfire and that Americans will quickly see that the new package of medical benefits they receive will not usher in "Armageddon." Obama returned to the city where he first laid out his healthcare proposal as a candidate for president nearly three years ago, the first stop in an aggressive White House push to defend a plan that is likely to be a focal point of the midterm elections in November.

'Waiting for Armageddon' MPAA rating: Unrated Running time: 1 hour, 14 minutes Playing: At the Downtown Independent, Los Angeles

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, retired spiritual leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which was based for several years in a Calabasas headquarters called Camelot and gained notoriety in the late 1980s for its followers' elaborate preparations for nuclear Armageddon, has died. She was 70. Prophet, who had Alzheimer's disease, died Thursday in Bozeman, Mont., her legal guardian, Murray Steinman, told the Associated Press. The church's beliefs combined aspects of the world's major religions, mixing Western philosophy with mysticism.

A wise man once said, "Don't go looking for disaster, it will find you soon enough." Apparently Nicolas Cage's astrophysicist, John Koestler, missed class that day because as soon as he discovers where and when upcoming disasters will occur, he drops son Caleb off at his sister's place, furrows his brow and heads straight into the maelstrom.

Is it guilty conscience or merely sour grapes that I detect in Michael Bay's assertion that "the press don't like to say nice things because nice is boring" in the round-table discussion of action movies ("How Much Bigger Can the Bang Get?" by Amy Wallace, Aug. 9). The cheap childishness of this remark is only matched by the far more expensive childishness of his last production. He claims to have seen The Times' reviewer at a screening of "Armageddon" "sitting there, 600 people cheering, laughing, and he had a scowl on his face.

Individual career aspirations account for much of California's destructive budget deadlock, but there is a darker dynamic at play. As the state's political composition evolves, some lawmakers appear to be falling into end-times thinking. The notion that they are fighting some Last Battle before the world they know passes away tends to magnify their partisan fervor -- and it does so at exactly the time they ought to be jettisoning doctrine and saving the state.