Armageddon
Even hugs come with helicopter fly-bys when Michael Bay is in charge
Directed By: Michael Bay
Other Notable Films From Bay: The Rock, Pain & Gain, Ambulance
Starring: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Clarke Duncan, Keith David
Screenplay By: Jonathan Hensleigh, J.J. Abrams
Movie Synopsis: A team of oil drillers get sent to outer space to stop an asteroid from destroying Earth.
Signature Line: “What are you doing with a gun in space?”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
There are two ways to handle things when you’re filming a space movie. You can try to make things as scientifically accurate as possible, like what Christopher Nolan did with Interstellar, or what Ron Howard did with Apollo 13, or what Alfonso Cuarón did with Gravity, or what Ridley Scott did with The Martian. Or you can just be like, “Man, fuck it. Let’s just throw a bunch of cool shit in here and see what happens.” Michael Bay opted for the latter.
In Armageddon, fire breaks out time and time again in atmospheres containing no oxygen; spaceships do fighter-jet maneuvers through cosmic debris fields; a guy shoots hundreds of bullets from a high-powered gatling gun while on an asteroid to no ill effect. Even the rules of science on Earth get ignored. (There’s a part near the end where everyone on the planet is celebrating and it’s daylight on every continent at once, which is fucking hilarious.) It’s a movie so riddled with errors, in fact, that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson famously accused it of violating “more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever.”
And yet, none of that mattered to audiences.
Despite tepid reviews from critics upon its release, Armageddon was a gigantic commercial success. It was the number one movie on the planet the year it came out (it earned $553 million at the box office, the equivalent to over $1.1 billion in today’s money), became an unexpected Oscar contender (it was nominated for four!!!! awards1), and was eventually chosen to be included in the prestigious Criterion Collection. Even its soundtrack, powered to dominance by the impossibly great Aerosmith earworm “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” was irresistible, topping the Billboard 200 chart by selling a mammoth 4.1 million copies in the U.S. alone.
Science is great, obviously. And adhering to as many of its laws as possible while making a movie can lead to a truly astonishing viewing experience.
But sometimes people just wanna watch some shit blow up.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Armageddon
1:12: How long after “A MICHAEL BAY FILM” do you think it’s gonna be before we get the first explosion of the movie? I’m setting the under/over at 2.5 minu—
1:16: Never mind. Four seconds. It took four seconds. Four seconds after “A MICHAEL BAY FILM” appeared on the screen, a six-mile-wide asteroid hit a prehistoric Earth with, per a narrator, “the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons.” God, I love Michael Bay.
2:58: Time jump, 65 million years later. Billy Bob Thornton is here. He plays Dan Truman, Executive Director at NASA. Everybody always talks about how silly Armageddon is (because it absolutely is), but the reason it works so well is because the cast is absolutely STACKED with first-class talent. I mean, Billy Bob Thornton was an Oscar-winner when he took this role. Ben Affleck, too. And Michael Clarke Duncan and Owen Wilson would grab their own Oscar nominations in the years to come. And Bruce Willis had multiple Emmy nominations. And Steve Buscemi would eventually earn more than a half-dozen Emmy nominations (and one win) himself. That’s six of the first nine names on the Armageddon call sheet!
3:44: Bang. Another explosion. A spaceship just got destroyed by a meteor shower. We’re less than four minutes into this thing and we’ve already gotten (a) a giant explosion on a prehistoric Earth; (b) a time jump 65 million years into the future (the longest time jump in movie history, by the way); and (c) a spaceship exploding in outer space. This is about be the Michael Bayest film that’s ever been Michael Bayed. I’m so excited for where we’re headed.
5:32: Keith David is here. He plays the authoritarian General Kimsey, and his main job in the movie is to look cool in his uniform and say no to stuff. Whenever I get around to putting together the official list of GOOD MOVIE All-Stars, David is a shoe-in for inclusion. Some of the non-Armageddon stuff he’s been in: Road House, Marked for Death, Reality Bites, Clockers, Dead Presidents, The Quick and the Dead, There’s Something About Mary, Requiem for a Dream, The Replacements, and Barbershop. The man’s taste is impeccable.
7:01: Three things about this moment where a dog attacks a pile of Godzilla toys:
Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla premiered the same summer as Armageddon. And a lot of people were expecting Godzilla to outperform Armageddon at the box office, which is why Bay decided to include a not-so-subtle jab at the movie by having a street vendor’s Godzilla toys get chewed up by a dog right before a meteor the size of a Volkswagen kills him. (The “him” being the vendor, not the dog. The dog lives.) Shoutout being petty. 🙌🙌🙌
The dog’s name in the movie is “Little Richard,” but his name in real life is “Franky.” That means the dog was doing real acting. He didn’t show up on set just to be himself. He was pretending to be a whole different dog, with a whole different dog backstory, and a whole different dog outlook on dog life. I respect him so much for that.
Look at the street vendor after the meteor hit him. He’s nothing but a pair of dismembered legs, lol:
I hope when I die, all that’s left of me is my legs. Just knees, shins, socks, and a pair of Nike Cortez.
11:02: A good example of how knowingly audacious Armageddon is: It opens by explaining that an asteroid six-miles wide hit Earth 65 million years ago, killing nearly all life on the planet and creating “a suffocating blanket of dust the Sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years.” Then it says that a new asteroid is headed toward present day Earth. But ours isn’t six-miles wide. No. It’s… SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THREE MILES WIDE!!!!!! Anything at or around 6-miles wide would’ve been reason enough to set Armageddon in motion. But Michael Bay wanted it more than 100x that big, solely so somebody could respond to the President asking how big it is with, “It’s the size of Texas, Mr. President.”
11:42: P.S. More from Truman: “It’s what we call a global killer. The end of mankind. Nothing would survive. Not even bacteria.” That’s what I used to say to my friends about how bad my mom was gonna whoop me every time report card season would roll around and I knew I was about to show her my six Fs and one A.2
12:07: Bruce Willis is here. He plays Harry Stamper, a third-generation oil driller and also the manliest possible man. The type of man who, when he gets a boner, the boner has stubble and smells of whiskey and won’t stop telling you how good of a Boner Linebacker he was on the Boner Football Team in Boner High School. “I was Boner All-State,” the boner says, “Could’ve played D1 Boner College Ball if I wanted. But I decided to drill for oil instead. Can’t drive an F-350 without oil.”
