Summer Baycation: Armageddon (1998)

Armageddon is in the Criterion Collection. People trot this out all the time like it’s a knock against Criterion. But Criterion has released a bunch of dumb shit over the years just to pay the bills. The difference is those other releases can at least make a case for themselves. What’s the case for Armageddon? Armageddon is a big, dumb summer blockbuster from a studio and filmmaker operating at peak performance. Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and the good people at Disney put their talents into overdrive to bring us THE movie for 1998. Not Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla. Not Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Not even the year’s other competing giant asteroid movie, Deep Impact.

Michael Goddamn Bay’s Arma-fuckin-Geddon.

This is a movie that pulls together a few different threads running through the culture of the late 90s. The year 2000 loomed large, and if you weren’t planning your New Year’s Eve party, you were sitting in a church pew listening to a sermon about preparing your soul for Jesus. Millennium Fever was real, the Y2K computer bug was all over the news, and everyone was busy making preparations one way or the other. “Armageddon” as a general concept was coursing its way through the culture in all kinds of ways leading up to the year 2000.

The late 90s were also when an “end of history”-brained America could conceive of no other aggressor to defend against, so we turned our attention to space. Independence Day landed in 1996, starring Bad Boys‘ Will Smith. Tim Burton goofed on it the same year with Mars Attacks! The next year we saw two made-for-TV movies about killer asteroids, Asteroid and Doomsday Rock. And finally, 1998 gave us the dueling behemoths: Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, and Michael Bay’s Armageddon.

NASA nostalgia was also at it’s cultural peak around this time. Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13 lionized the engineers and technicians that ultimately saved the lives of astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. That movie’s star, Tom Hanks, followed it up with the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, telling the entire story of the space race over 12 episodes. All of this was a microcosm of the 60s nostalgia that blazed a trail a mile wide through the culture of the time, leading up to the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. So an action spectacular about the NASA of the moment saving the world from total annihilation seemed like the logical conclusion to everything going on in the late 90s.

At the same time, Armageddon feels like a direct response to Apollo 13 and Independence Day. It takes elements of both, mixes them with our anxiety over the looming millennium, and filters it all through the worldviews of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer. The result? A big, blustery pro-American epic about how people from all walks of life (but mostly anti-establishment tough guys) can team up to save the world from the ultimate calamity. And as much as Armageddon feels like it’s cribbing from those earlier films, it’s still very much a Michael Bay product, so it’s also thumbing its nose at them as hard as it can. “Nerds aren’t the real heroes. Heroes are the real heroes!”

Bay can talk all he wants about how much he loves NASA and how cool it is to be filming on the actual space shuttle launchpads, but then look at how he portrays these people in the film. The engineers, astronauts and doctors are ineffectual eggheads who sit around talking about theory instead of getting their hands dirty and doing the hard work. They could have sent two teams of highly trained astronauts up to take out the asteroid, and were on the brink of doing just that until John McClane shows up and scoffs at their playbook. This is a theme running through a lot of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, now that I think about it. From Armageddon, to Top Gun, to fucking Beverly Hills Cop, the moral of all of these stories is the same: Nothing ever gets done by people following the rules. Only the rugged individual—the maverick, you might say—can save the day by following his gut and doing what he wants.

When NASA scientists discover a Texas-sized asteroid hurtling towards the Earth, NASA director Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) green-lights a plan to land on the asteroid, drill a hole into its core, and detonate a nuclear bomb inside, blowing it to smithereens. Simple, easy, I love it. But in order to pull it off, Truman contacts veteran offshore driller Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) to advise the crew on how to do this.

Stamper doesn’t trust a bunch of astronauts to successfully drill a hole into the asteroid, and basically forces Truman to beg him to go up and do the job himself. But if Stamper’s gonna go, he wants his own crew, so we get a montage set to Aerosmith’s cover of “Come Together” where the FBI rounds up every member of Stamper’s crew. There’s outlaw biker Bear (Michael Clarke Duncan), compulsive gambler Chick (Will Patton), genius pervert Hound (Steve Buscemi), Actual Cowboy Oscar (Owen Wilson), and Stamper’s future son-in-law A.J. (Ben Affleck). These guys are thrown into a weeklong crash course in NASA flight training so that they can fly up, drill into the asteroid, and save the world.

It’s a pretty clean three-act story: Meet our characters and identify the problem, show our characters training to address the problem, then send them into space to solve the problem. But then within that structure is a whooole lotta movie; two and a half hours of it, to be precise. Armageddon is at its best when it lets our cast play around within a given scene. The rapid-fire sequence where the crew receive medical and psychological evaluations is great, anchored by weirdo character actor Udo Kier just blankly staring at everyone as they make an absolute hash of the entire thing.

I kinda get the feeling they knew the movie needed as much humor as it could get, because the grim tone of the actual plot is damn near suffocating. The NASA suits stand around waiting for the sky to fall on their heads. We get constant reminders of the looming devastation as meteors destroy New York, Paris and Shanghai. As the president gives his speech to the world, the film cuts to a dozen different countries, all of humanity united as they watch two space shuttles full of idiots take off to maybe save the world. It’s downright maudlin at times, and Bay shoots it that way. Lots of close-ups angled up in our cast’s faces, lots of sweaty brows and strained expressions. They really go all in on making you believe the world is ending. To balance it out, you need wacko performances from Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare to remind us that this is supposed to be a fun summer popcorn movie.

Oh yeah, Peter Stormare’s in this thing too. He plays Lev, the Russian cosmonaut who meets up with our team on the Space Station Mir to refuel their shuttles. He’s a little bit cuckoo from being all alone in space for a year and a half, and yet somehow he’s not the character who winds up with space dementia. Anyway, a wacky comedy of errors occurs where Ben Affleck can’t understand Stormare’s gibbering Russian nonsense, which ends with Affleck accidentally blowing up the entire station, but not before escaping with Stormare in tow. If I have any one nitpick with the science of the movie, it’s this: Wouldn’t adding an extra crew member that the engineers didn’t plan for dramatically throw off the figures of the flight? The added weight means the ship burns more fuel, uses more oxygen, etc. The shuttle that Lev boards winds up crashing on the asteroid, but explicitly not because it’s suddenly overweight. The other shuttle overshoots the landing site by like twenty miles, so maybe the other ship was underweight? Who knows… The movie literally rocket-jumps over a similar gap in logic, so why get hung up on this one?

The whole movie kinda falls apart in the third act, but not because of narrative incoherence or “Bayhem” or any other dumb meme complaints about Michael Bay as a filmmaker. No, it falls apart for me mostly because the asteroid set is junky and stupid looking. It looks less like the surface of the asteroid and more like the Aggro Crag from the Nickelodeon game show GUTS. Jagged shards of fiberglass debris dot the surface, dust and smoke fly around for no reason, the camera shakes and jitters as the crew begin their drilling mission. It’s just a real headache to look at. And then somewhere in the middle of it, Ben Affleck jumps a space humvee over a giant canyon. Okay, so there’s a little Bayhem going on.

This is really where the film’s length becomes a problem, because it’s not enough that our heroes finally make it to the big finale. They keep throwing extra little obstacles in their way. Shuttle #2 crashed twenty miles from Shuttle #1. There’s a huge canyon between them that can only be traversed by jumping a space humvee. The asteroid turns out to be solid iron that’s really hard to drill through. Steve Buscemi goes crazy with a machine gun that suddenly appears on the driller. It’s just one thing after another, after another. The climax of Armageddon is just ten problems on top of each other, and oh by the way, William Fichtner is here and now he has a gun. It’s exhausting.

But sacrifices are made, the day is saved, and some of our heroes come home to throngs of cheering, adoring, flag-waving fans. Hooray! The ending is very patriotic and heartwarming. Chick finally gets to hug his estranged son, who jumps into his dad’s arms wearing an American flag t-shirt. It’s the ultimate symbol of achieving the American dream, and all he had to do to achieve it was learn to be an astronaut, fly into space and save the entire planet. If you want to be a simple homeowner with a kid or two these days, yeah that’s about what it takes.

The single best thing about Armageddon, though, is the fabled filmmakers’ commentary on the Criterion DVD set. Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer and Bruce Willis all take turns discussing various aspects of the film, it’s a pretty solid commentary. But then there’s Ben Affleck, who is often hilariously critical of the movie. He rightly points out how ridiculous the whole premise is. “Eight whole months? As if that’s not enough time to learn how to drill a hole, but in a week we’re gonna learn how to be astronauts.” And every time Billy Bob Thornton appears onscreen, Affleck starts repeating everything he says in the Sling Blade voice. There are other great details peppered throughout, like when Bay tells the story of how he had Bruckheimer spend $20,000 to fix Affleck’s ‘baby teeth’. Fortunately, someone recently uploaded the entire commentary to YouTube, and it’s absolutely worth a listen.

Armageddon was the highest grossing movie of 1998, landing around $553 million worldwide. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, all of them technical awards. Most of the awards the film did win were for Aerosmith’s love ballad “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, a song that was inescapable in 1998. That song won the MTV Movie Award for Best Song From a Movie, as well as the Video Music Award for Best Video from a Film. The song was a phenomenon. It was a #1 hit in eleven countries. It was everywhere, and it gave Aerosmith a third wind in the late 90s that petered out not long after the turn of the millennium.

The song is as maudlin and corny as the movie itself, and feels like such a calculated move. It’s a love ballad underpinning the least developed part of the movie, the romance between A.J. and Harry’s daughter Grace (Liv Tyler, daughter of Aerosmith singer Steven). Once again, the Criterion commentary comes to the rescue, as Michael Bay tells us they added A.J. and Grace’s entire plot as a reaction to Titanic. “The kids want a love story,” he says, so they added a love story. Just another point to the idea that Armageddon only exists because they were chasing other people’s success. I mean, I can’t fault Bay for that line of logic. As a blockbuster filmmaker, he’s also a business man.

Business or no, he still made a movie that says it celebrates NASA and its engineers, while putting them down in favor of rough and tumble blue collar Americans. Those folks deserve all the respect in the world too, I’m not saying they they don’t. It’s just kinda weird to say how much you respect STEM workers and then have your main character call them a bunch of stupid nerds to their faces. Armageddon feels like the film equivalent of saying “I Fucking Love Science,” when all you’re really saying is you fucking love Star Wars. I simply can’t get behind that.

Once again, though, Bay would find himself chasing the trends instead of setting them. Saving Private Ryan beat Armageddon at the US box office. So naturally, Bay set his sights on a World War II drama for his next feature.

UP NEXT: Just what the world needed, another Ben Affleck romance.