Armageddon turns 25: Bonus Cinematic Throwback

The 1990s were the glory days of the summer blockbuster. And for me, nothing more perfectly fits what that era of movies was than Michael Bay's Armageddon. 

As mentioned once before on this award winning blog, 1998 was a summer with 2 big movies built around asteroid coming towards earth. Deep Impact was the more serious and realistic version. Armageddon though was not interested in realism or even in being that serious.

1998 was THE summer. It was just such a glorious time in my life, and this movie sits 25 years later as one of the most instantly transporting movies to a time and place. It is just perfect to me.

The hype for this got started early. It had one of those true teaser trailers late in 97. Didn't even have any footage from the movie, just naming Bruce Willis as the star and highlighting the director/producer team of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer. That was sure all I needed. Bay was red hot after Bad Boys and The Rock, and Bruckheimer was in the middle of that great late 90s/early 2000s run himself. The movie also had one of the coolest Super Bowl spots ever.

Armageddon wastes no time getting right into it. The fantastic opening sequence has a meteor shower first destroying a space shuttle and then raining down on New York City. Yeah there's a soon to be awkward shot of both World Trade Center towers on fire with gaping holes in them, but still, this is a fabulous start to the movie. One of the best opening 10 minutes for any movie ever.

The pace keeps up, as NASA (led by Billy Bob Thornton) discovers that the meteor shower was just the prelude, that there is also an asteroid the size of Texas heading towards earth in 18 days.

People shit on this movie for the premise of oil drillers going into space, but the movie sets up the reasons well. 

Leading said team is Bruce Willis, when he was still easily one of the biggest stars in the world. Also coming along are his daughter Liv Tyler, and Ben Affleck (right as his star was rising), pre-stardom Owen Wilson, debuting Michael Clarke Duncan, and vets Steve Buscemi and Will Patton. Plus a couple other guys. 

Much of the rest of the film's opening half is an extended astronaut training montage. I love all this stuff. Lots of good laughs. The cast really worked great together.

There is also the romance between Tyler and Affleck. I believe this plot was beefed up a lot after Titanic. I can't imagine the movie without it. Affleck's charisma is off the charts here, but he has never had chemistry with anybody else like he does with Tyler (which we saw again in Jersey Girl). And Tyler (in a role originally set for the then white hot Neve Campbell) has never been more winning. Some of the love story scenes got mocked, and yeah, it gets cheesy at points. But that good cheese.

So we get the training, and some very well done exposition basically setting up the 2nd half of the film. The asteroid has to be blown up before passing "zero barrier". The stakes get upped when another meteor chunk wipes out a bunch of Asia and the oncoming disaster becomes public knowledge.

The stirring peak of the movie is when the shuttles launch. This film has one of the great scores of all time (shoutout Trevor Rabin) and it kicks up and man is it fucking cinema.

And we're only half done with the movie. I remember it getting ripped for basically turning everything into an action sequence (like that's a bad thing?) and the next stop is the space station. As if the cast isn't already fun enough we now get Peter Stormare with a Russian accent.

Things go haywire. We get a pulse-pounding sequence where everybody has to quickly evacuate before the station explodes. 

Movie skips ahead a day or two to the day when they all have to land on the asteroid. That too is an action sequence where things go haywire. This is tense stuff, since the fate of the world is literally hanging in the balance. One of the shuttles goes down. We lose a few astronauts. We lose Wilson. Everybody else is presumed dead, but Affleck, Duncan and Stormare survive. So we get a bunch of fun scenes of the 3 of them trying to reach the other team. 

That team (Willis, Buscemi, Patton, astronaut William Fichtner, and a few others) landed okay but have their own issues, making it look like they won't be able to get the job done. The movie is just incredible at establishing this end of the world tension and holding it, even if, sure, we know that it was never going to end with the whole world dying. And it's legitimately pretty great at at least making that possibility very real to the characters.

There's one little bit of filler where the bomb is maybe going to be detonated remotely, so there's some back and forth down at NASA. We do get one of Tyler's best moments in there. We also get to see Paris destroyed, and little snippets of the world preparing to end. 

The only part of this act that I might have cut down or cut out is some of the Buscemi comic relief. It's a bit much, and the drama is really working. We don't need it. 

But anyway, all looks lost and the world is about to end. But then Affleck and company show up to save the day. I always wondered why the drilling depth HAD to be 800 feet. I mean, what if they hit 790 and that's it? Still, it's classic fist pump cinema when they hit that mark.

But of course it isn't that easy. There's a whole sequence where bits of the asteroid break up and start crashing into everything. A couple more people get killed, and the bomb gets damaged so that someone has to stay behind and detonate it.

I don't remember if this was predictable when I first saw it or not. They all draw straws. Affleck gets the short one. Willis takes him out to say goodbye, but then takes his place instead. There's this whole subplot in the movie how Willis doesn't want Affleck and Tyler together, but now at the end he says he thinks of Affleck as his son and wants him to go ahead and marry his daughter. Come on, man, I don't care how manipulative it is. If you ain't crying by now then fuck you.

We ain't done. The last 20 minutes of Armageddon are emotional as hell. We're barely past the Willis goodbye to Affleck before it's time for the Willis goodbye to Tyler. Oh lord. There are some times watching the movie where one of these scenes doesn't get me fully. Not this one. I have literally never watched this scene and not at minimum got a little teary. Liv Tyler is just incredible in this movie. Willis too. I mean, he digs deep a few times. 

We still ain't done. There's a countdown clock to zero barrier and of course Bay isn't not going to have the classic ticking clock moment taking things right down to the end. Again, we know the movie is not going to have its star make the ultimate sacrifice and then fail ("Harry doesn't know how to fail") but it is tremendously exciting all the same.

So yes, Armageddon has a happy ending, with some bittersweetness. We get a few more moments that usually get me. "Yo Harry, you the man", Patton reuniting with his kid (another of those tiny plot threads Bay makes very impactful), Fichtner asking Tyler if he can "shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I ever met." 😭😭😭

And then for good measure we head out with Aerosmith's "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" which was an absolute monster hit song that year and legitimately fantastic. And what is a true 90s blockbuster without a hit song?

The song was a smash and so was the movie, the biggest hit of 1998, and probably one of the last top grossers to not be some kind of franchise movie. It took a critical drubbing, but whatever. Those people were all wrong. I saw this 3 times in theaters, and contrary to most big movies I think this played even better on the small screen.

I fucking adore this movie.

It makes the absolute most out of its premise. I mean there have been good movies before and since that fit into the disaster genre. Nothing hits on every level like this. It's exciting, emotional, funny, nostalgic. 

The cast is stellar. Willis isn't just going through the motions like he sometimes did. This is as good as he ever was. I've already sung the praises of Tyler. She's kept acting (most notably LOTR) but has never come close to matching this. Affleck is just charming as hell. Buscemi is a bit much in the 3rd act but he and Duncan especially are great comic relief. Patton is incredible in this. Thornton, who I guess hated being in this, is fantastic. He honestly might give my favorite performance of the whole ensemble. Fichtner is awesome. Maybe could have had a better actress for the main female astronaut, but whatever. Small role. The film is loaded with vivid tiny roles for people like Keith David and Jason Isaacs. Hell they even had Charlton Heston narrate the prologue. 

But forever first and foremost this is the peak of Michael Bay. I loved his whole run pre-Transformers (and even those I mostly enjoy) but this was where he put it all together on the grandest scale. I genuinely pity the people who dismissed it then or now as just some empty action movie.

It is the glorious epitomie of everything that I loved about blockbuster filmmaking in the greatest decade ever for them.