A Review of "Armageddon"

"OMG it's, it's--!"
"Yeah, that's right. We're the saviors of planet E--"
"IT'S THE BACKSTREET BOYS! THE BACKSTREET BOYS ARE GOING TO SAVE US FROM THE ASTEROID!!"

Happy Friday! Oh man, I am ready to dive into and tear apart this sweaty turd. I haven't really been able to get into the Christmas spirit, movie review-wise, this holiday season. I don't really know why, but I want to kind of just end the year reviewing random movies before I take perhaps 2 weeks off at the end of the year. I have some plans on what I will review starting next year! Stay tuned on that.

"Sharpe, blast off! Even though it's structurally, physically,
scientifically, and utterly impossible... I'mma need you
to blast off, ASAP!"

But we're here to talk today! That means we're resurrecting our dear friend we spoke about earlier this summer when I reviewed the Transformers movies: Michael Bay. Mr. Explosion of filmmaking. Michael Bay, the man whose stories have more holes in them than a grunge guitarist's jeans. Michael Bay, the man whose long-winded one hundred and fifty minute narratives either entertain dearly or torture mercilessly. Or in today's, case? Entertain mercilessly!... or torture dearly, however you want to look at it. Look, I'm rambling by this point. this is Armageddon. A movie that teaches us physics, science, basic textbook understanding of how anything nuclear, technological, or mechanical in the world works... none of that comes into play when sending two space shuttles full of oil drillers up to an incoming asteroid to blow it in half to save the Earth from destruction.

Fasten your seatbelts, because we're in for a wild, fun, albeit completely and utterly ridiculously nonsensical joyride. Let's bury a nuke eight hundred feet into this plot and blow it in half. This is Armageddon!

So after an elementary school history lesson rehash by Charlton Heston regarding the dinosaurs being wiped out by an asteroid, the movie opens... oddly enough... with a massive meteor shower which destroys the orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis, before entering the atmosphere and bombarding New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Moncton, Halifax, and Newfoundland. The meteors were pushed out of the asteroid belt by a collision from a rogue comet and a massive asteroid the size of Texas, and NASA learns that the asteroid will impact Earth in approximately eighteen days, potentially wiping out all life on Earth. NASA devises a plan to have a deep hole drilled into the asteroid, into which they will insert and detonate a nuclear bomb to destroy the asteroid.

"Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking. We're
about 26,000 miles out from our destination on the Asteroid...
should have you on the ground in about 30 mins, thanks for
flying NASA."
"... SHIT, man! My peanuts floated off my table tray again!"

Truman (Billy Bob Thornton)... head of NASA at this point, recruits none other than Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), a third-generation oil driller and owner of his own oil drilling company. Harry agrees to help, but on the condition that he bring in his own team to do the drilling. He picks his best employees for the job: Chick Chapel (Will Patton), his best friend and right-hand man; geologists Rockhound (Steve Buscemi) and Oscar Choice (Owen Wilson); and drillers Bear Curlene (Michael Clarke Duncan), Freddie Noonan (Clark Brolly), Max Lennert (Ken Campbell), and A.J. Frost (Ben Affleck)... who has been dating Harry's daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) despite Harry's objections. Over twelve days, they are trained to become astronauts with astronaut Col. Willie Sharp (William Fichtner), who will pilot Freedom — one of the two shuttles to fly to the asteroid, the other being the Independence. Before leaving, Chick apologizes to his ex-wife Denise (Judith Hoag) for wronging her and sees his son, who is unaware of his parentage. Grace accepts A.J.'s marriage proposal, much to Harry's reluctant dismay; she later has her father promise to return home safe with her fiancé.

Following the destruction of Shanghai by another meteor strike, word of the massive asteroid becomes public to the world. Both shuttles take off without incident and dock with the Russian Space Station Mir to take on fuel. During fueling, a broken pipeline causes a leak and ignites the fuel pod on fire. A.J. and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Lev Andropov (Peter Stormare) manage to board Independence before the space station is destroyed. Approaching the asteroid, Independence is damaged by debris and crashes, killing all on board except Lev, Bear, and A.J. They embark in the shuttle's Armadillo to find the Freedom crew, which lands a whopping twenty-six miles from its intended landing site. When the drilling goes slower than predicted, Sharp reports to Mission Control that it is unlikely the team will reach the depth necessary to destroy the asteroid before "Zero Barrier", the point after which detonating the rock will not save Earth. The President of the United States decides to remotely detonate the bomb from Earth immediately, which will cause total mission failure. Sharp and Harry have a vicious argument, but agree to defuse the bomb and work together after Harry promises Sharp that he will accomplish the mission. They make progress on drilling, but a missed gas pocket causes the Armadillo and Max to be blown into space. Just as Harry, NASA, and the world believe the mission to be a failure, while another meteor destroys Paris, A.J. and the others arrive in the second Armadillo.

"A.J.! I have to go outside and help your dad with the nuke.
Hold my vape pen in case I don't make it back."
"We get it bro, you vape."
"SERIOUSLY THIS IS MY LAST CARTRIDGE OF THIS
FLAVOR, DON'T LOSE IT!"

A.J. succeeds in drilling the hole to the required depth, but a rock storm kills Gruber and damages the remote detonator, forcing someone to stay behind and manually detonate the bomb. They draw straws; the responsibility falls upon A.J. Harry takes him down to the asteroid's surface, and disconnects A.J.'s air hose, forces him into the shuttle's air lock and tells A.J. that he is the son Harry never had and he would be proud to have him marry Grace. Using the Armadillo, Harry tearfully gives Grace his blessing to marry A.J., and Grace says that she is proud to be his daughter. After some difficulty, Freedom takes off, but then a second blowout causes Harry to lose his grip on the detonator. Just before Zero Barrier, he detonates the bomb and saves the planet. The astronauts land on Earth safely. A.J. and Grace are reunited and Chick reconciles with his ex-wife and estranged son. Later, A.J. and Grace are married with the portraits of Harry and the others lost on the mission present in memoriam.

Ok so... *takes glasses off*, *rubs eyes in anguish*... that was a lot. Now, before I get started stating the obvious and dissecting why this movie's such a fun turd (much like the carnival ride that makes you puke), I will say that it's a very fun adventure. I mean, I still enjoy the thrill of the adventure this movie brings. Finding a bunch of average Joes, training them to be astronauts in twelve days (which is asinine in-and-of-itself... why don't you just train astronauts to be oil drillers?? Am I right?), and sending them to space in an epic quest to blow up a Texas-sized asteroid in order to save the day. That is a fun idea for an adventure movie, and I still love popping in Armageddon every now and then to rewatch.

♫ I don't wanna go in spaaaace--I don't wanna fly right now
cause this is dang-er-ous, and I DON'T WANNA F*CKIN'
DIE♫

But HOLY MOTHER OF HELL I love laughing at just how much complete CRAP this movie expects me to swallow. In doing some light research on the movie for this blog post, I found a crazy factoid I hope is true: Supposedly, in real life, NASA shows this film during their management training program. New managers are given the task of trying to spot as many scientific and physics-related errors as possible. So far, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY EIGHT have been found. That's 1-6-8. Good God, Almighty. Fire and explosions in space, the way the asteroid is supposedly spinning on all-three axes yet the view of the Earth from the asteroid never changes, the fact Freedom takes off from the asteroid near the end of the movie horizontally and without a runway... which is absolutely absurd and preposterous; they played incredibly fast and loose with this mindless schlock. THEN... fucking THEN there's the issue of the two shuttles taking off in close proximity to each other. The close distance could result in significant damage or destruction for either or both vehicles! Whether by incineration from take off, bad wind sheers from ascent, damage from jettisoning their solid rocket boosters so close to each other in space: I mean the list of horrifically careless disregards for science baffle me.

...and THEN, AND FUCKING THEN... there's the PLOT holes that don't have anything to do with science! Like given the quick-natured scheduling of the mission and the supposed "Top Secret" nature of the X-71 shuttle program, how in the name of ass does a RUSSIAN SPACE STATION hold the fuel the shuttles need to do the lunar roll maneuver and fly to the asteroid?!... and during the whole drama with disarming the remote detonation on the nuclear device, you'd think the WEAPONS SPECIALIST who's there solely to SUPERVISE the GODDAMN DEVICE would know what freakin' wire to cut when the device's counter is counting down. AAND THEEEN... from an IT standpoint... Killing the uplink to the nuclear weapon would not stop the timer, remotely. Once the timer on anything, let alone a bomb, has been started remotely via an uplink, the timer on it would  then function independently of any other remote functions. It would take an override code via an active uplink, not a killed uplink, to stop it. Thus, Truman's ploy to "buy them maybe two minutes" on the comet would have been useless. What he should have done was use the uplink to stop the timer, not kill the uplink itself.

"I love you, A.J. Be safe in space!"
"Just a sec, honey. I got some barbecue sauce on your
shoulder."
"I--, you--, what are you doing back there?'

Good God, this movie was utterly careless with its goofs. You can read a boatload more goofs on IMDb, where I pulled a few of these but also wrote some from memory. Taking all the haphazard, quick-handed, cash-in, shameless, effortless, skip-over, careless, nonchalant writing sessions that resulted in this screenplay? YEP. It has absolutely redeeming qualities, which is why I think it's still such a good movie despite all it's glaring gaffes; its characters and their actors are all PERFECTLY cast. They all have punchy one-liners, unique personalities, hilarious presences in many situations, and each one plays very hilariously off the next. All tied together by the serious and stoic Bruce Willis and Will Patton. The jokes said by Rockhound, the humor relayed by the banter between Bear and Oscar, all great, and memorable. So many great quotable lines in this flick.

That, and the movie does still jerk a few tears out of me at the end when Liv Tyler is saying goodbye to her dad via camera comm-link a gut-wrenching scene for me still. That says something in a bloated blockbuster such as this. Not many can do that. That, and one last thing: Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing". I rest my case.

Armageddon is something I hate to say you gotta experience it at least once. Everybody should at least once, just so they can inevitably say one of two things: "God that was fun", or "Holy Jesus that sucked". Honestly, both can be warranted reviews, but I'll still pop in this bottle rocket of fun any day of the week.