There is a good reason why Michael Bay films make good popcorn fodder but terrible instructional films. Armageddon is one of Bay’s biggest action movies, but has such a laughable plot that even the stars of the movie have shared hilarious takes on it – go check out Ben Affleck’s audio commentary. Now, NASA experts have had the chance to rip apart the film just like an asteroid being taken out by a bunch of under-qualified oil drillers.
While there is no way of denying that Armageddon delivers blockbuster thrills, and attacked both the box office and music charts back 1998, the Bruce Willis movie earned over $550 million at the box office, even though many of those who saw it couldn’t really stand by any of the logic it offered in order to set up its third act. Now the big-budget offering that required brains to be set to sleepy mode has given NASA experts so many faults, it is hard to know where to start, even if they have started using it in their training to see how many mistakes recruits can spot.
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Ben Affleck 100% Stands By His Harsh ‘Armageddon’ DVD Commentary Criticisms of the Michael Bay Disaster Blockbuster
Ben Affleck’s brutal comments about ‘Armageddon’s less than convincing plot, which he made on a DVD commentary track, are ones he still stands by.
In an interview with inews, astrophysicist Alastair Bruce wasted some time assessing various aspects of Armageddon and noted that much of what is seen on screen is just complete rubbish, starting with the size of the asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth in the movie. He said:
“The rock is just too damn big. That’s why it’s fun to talk about, because it’s such a Hollywood thing – they went big, and then they went way too big… Once you get up to 1 km-sized rocks, that’s when we get nervous. That size could significantly devastate an entire region on the planet. Those rocks, luckily, are pretty rare. We’ve got telescopes that can keep an eye out for those things.
“You would probably be able to see it with the naked eye at least a few months before it hit. In Armageddon, they don’t notice it until 18 days before the rock smashes into us. I mean – it would be visible. People would be looking at the sky, going ‘what’s that?’”
‘Armageddon’s Plan is “Ridiculous”
It is fair to say that if there was a rock the size of Texas heading to Earth, there is surely government department checking the CVs of some oil drillers to jog off into space and sort it out. Bruce continued:
“Everything sort of vaporises. That’s bad for a few reasons. Even if you were able to vaporise the entire rock, it would still be moving with an incredible speed towards the Earth. All you’ve really done is spread out the impact. “Some of the locations are genuine NASA locations. The launchpads are real, but they are made to look a bit prettier in CGI. Some of the training sites they use are genuine. They did have NASA’s help with a lot of this. It’s just the core science of the film that’s wrong.”
While all of this may be true, it does not stop Armageddon being exactly the kind of big, fist-pumping spectacle that often keeps box offices alive, and the type of movie that can pass the time when you just need to see a bunch of A-listers doing something literally out of this world no matter how silly it all seems. It may not be logic, but it is cinema.
Source: inews
Armageddon
- Release Date
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July 1, 1998
- Runtime
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151 minutes
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