Jeremy’s Tophunder №89: Armageddon

7 min readJun 14, 2020

I tell people that I like Michael Bay movies, and I do like them.

But sometimes, I’ll watch a Michael Bay movie for the 13th or 14th time, and it will finally hit me, and I’ll think, “what the hell am I doing here? I’ve wasted 30+ hours of my life watching -this- garbage?”

Sometimes, this happens.

This is not what happened when I watched Armageddon this week.

There are people out there in the world that will try to tell you that Armageddon is a terrible movie, devoid of any artistic or entertainment merit, and it is a giant waste of your time, and you should never watch it.

Those people are wrong.

What I’m here to tell you, is that Armageddon is a terrible movie, devoid of any artistic entertainment, and it’s incredible, it’s 100 percent worth your time (even if you’ve already seen it multiple times), and you should go out of your way to watch it at any opportunity you get.

Michael Bay lets his moviestars be moviestars. He constructs an absurd and ridiculous scenario, then unleashes his actors into the world and tells them to do whatever they want, because there’s nothing they can do that will be more ridiculous than the very premise of the movie. Some people remember the Golden Age of Hollywood as an era where actors basically just played the same character in every movie. There wasn’t much of a trend toward “method acting” until the 1950s. Sure, they were “acting,” but for the most part, they were just playing themselves. That’s what Michael Bay does. He takes an actor like Bruce Willis and creates a character that is essentially every other Bruce Willis character distilled down into one guy, and then tells Bruce Willis to play Bruce Willis. That’s how you end up with a movie where legitimately talented actors mingle with actively bad actors, a few one trick ponies, and a various assortment of other That Guys, and for the life of you, you can’t figure out who’s overacting on purpose, who’s overacting because they don’t know how else to act, and who’s actually trying.

Like, seriously. If you’re ever so inclined, take two and a half hours out of your day, watch Armageddon, and then try to guess who from the cast has received Oscar nominations for acting. There are two of them. See if you can guess. I bet it will take you a few tries.

It’s part of the reason I genuinely love Armageddon as much as I do — there are some legitimately talented actors in the movie. None of them are acting particularly well, but it’s just funny to me to see this star-studded cast ham it up to an outrageous degree. It’s very, very clear to me that everyone on the set realized what kind of movie they were making.

Armageddon was ahead of its time. That’s probably its biggest curse. Over the last 20 years, there’s been a very clear trend of film critics getting more and more on board with movies being over the top on purpose. Just as a comparison, the Fast & Furious franchise has received Rotten Tomatoes scores of 67 percent or higher for the last five movies in the series (topping out at 81 percent on Furious 7). From where I sit, I really don’t see that much of a difference between Armageddon and the Fast & Furious movies. They even both star a short bald guy with no neck. Just swap space drilling for cars and guns and they’re basically the same movie. That level of ridiculousness has become endearing at this point, at least to a certain extent. For whatever reason, it wasn’t endearing in the late 90s. It might be a cyclical thing — maybe movies like Independence Day and Twister and Speed and The Rock (all from 94–96, and all of which got good reviews — Speed in particular sits at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) set a certain standard, so when the action movies of ’97 and ’98 (Con Air, Deep Impact, Godzilla, Armageddon, Lethal Weapon 4) came out, everyone was just kind of over it? I don’t know. I don’t really understand the disconnect, because I don’t really see a huge difference in quality between any of those movies I just listed (there’s obviously some, but not a ton), and yet there’s almost a 60-point gap in Rotten Tomatoes scores between the “best” (Speed) and the “worst” (Armageddon).

There are a few casting choices in Armageddon that I absolutely love, and they’re not ones you probably think about, well, ever. There are four guys — Chris Ellis, Andy Milder, Christian Clemenson, and one who is apparently actually named Googy Gress, who appeared in both Apollo 13 and Armageddon. They’re very marginally in either movie, but they’re in both, and they all play NASA employees in both movies. I can only assume that Michael Bay was sitting in a casting session to flesh out some smaller roles, wasn’t happy with whatever he was seeing, and just finally snapped and yelled “just get me the guys from Apollo 13!”

The movie had an unprecedented amount of access to NASA technology, and a lot of it made it into the final cut of the movie. The underwater training scene was filmed at NASA’s real giant tank that helps their astronauts simulate low gravity. Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis were the first people from outside NASA to ever be in the tank. They were also given permission to set up cameras at close range to an actual NASA launch (also a first), and they were the first movie ever allowed to film inside NASA’s actual control room. Or, at least, they would have been, but Bay actually turned them down, because the NASA control room wasn’t cool-looking enough. He built a cooler one on a sound stage and filmed there. I can’t think of anything that encapsulates Michael Bay more than that.

There’s actually probably fewer digital effects on the movie than you’d think. The asteroid was actually built at scale in order to film it at close range, and the scenes filmed “on” the asteroid were actually filmed on one of the biggest sets ever built. It took a 150-person production staff three months to build it, and they even excavated about 1000 cubic feet out of the floor of the stage to make room for cameras so that Bay could get all of the low-angle shots he’s famous for.

And people have the audacity to call him lazy.

Like, I get it. It’s not a good movie. But it also was never trying to be, so I’m not sure I get that criticism. If Michael Bay were writing out his list of motivations during the production process, the first six things on the list would all be some variation of the world “spectacle” in all caps, the seventh thing on the list would be “pretty girls,” and then only after that would there be anything about making a quality piece of art. And I kinda have to respect him for that. That’s the natural progression of any art form that eventually gains mainstream profitability. Eventually, in some instances, the art gets left behind. And that’s okay.

Armageddon is a long movie, and a bad movie, but somehow it’s still a great movie. I love every second of it. I love Steve Buscemi getting “space dementia.” I love NASA deciding to send drillers into space rather than train astronauts how to drill. I love the idea of drilling into an asteroid and dropping a bomb into it in order to save the world. I love that Michael Bay forced Ben Affleck to get his teeth fixed before filming the movie. Everything about the movie is ridiculous, and I love it. If you don’t like it, fine, you don’t have to. Just know that you’re wrong, and I feel sorry for you.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige