Previously: Michael Bay pulled automobiles down from space in 2007, but in 1998 he sent them up.
1998 was a huge year for asteroids. The century was coming to a close, the century we first visited space. But if we can make it up there, maybe the terror of space can also come to us.
First came Deep Impact, which in the following two decades didn’t persist to the extent of Armageddon. The similarities between the two are supposedly coincidental, but Bruce Rubin, writer of Deep Impact, insists that Armageddon was a blatant and deliberate ripoff. The former focuses on a team of astronauts attempting to stop a world-ending comet by detonating a nuclear bomb on it. Armageddon, on the other hand, focuses on a team of astronauts attempting to stop a world-ending comet by detonating a nuclear bomb in it. But the latter did have a twist - the astronauts have only just become astronauts. After NASA determines that a bomb detonated on the surface of the impending asteroid would have no effect, they recruit the world’s best deep-sea oil drillers to enter it and detonate from within.
Deep Impact was generally considered more scientifically accurate, but it failed to capture the same aggressively phallic imagery of a bunch of dudes drilling apart a big space rock. So who wins in the end? (Conversely, Armageddon is used by NASA to have trainees spot as many mistakes as they can in the film.)
You wouldn’t think such an absurd concept was on the cards based on the nihilistic opening narration, which travels back in time to recount the cosmic coincidence of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
It emphasises the notion that this could happen again, at any time, and it is perhaps a miracle that it hasn’t already. Which is true, of course, but nobody wants to hear that. We want to see Ben Affleck sing! (He debuts an awful singing voice in Armageddon, but to get to that fun stuff, we must first contend with the fragility of the Anthropocene.)
Nebulous images of asteroids falling with whispy colour trails and fantastically otherworldly rock formations show the beginnings of Bay’s extra-terrestrial fascination. Stalactites and stalagmites protrude and threaten. Up until now he’s remained comfortably on earth with Bad Boys and The Rock. But this moment of looking up would inevitably lead him to pursue a five film series about robot aliens. The machinery is here too, with his focus on the space station and ships delighting in the mechanical intricacies of valves blowing and sirens blaring in the empty void of space. He’s getting hooked on these hulking contraptions and their minute movements of grinding gears.
Unhospitable environments aren’t limited to the cosmos for Bay however, as he terraforms the earth into brimstone, beginning his disaster-obsessed images. Completely indifferent to an introduction to any of our cast of characters, Bay spends a luxurious ten minutes moving his way through cataclysmic destruction of landmarks.
Beginning with a playful small-scale parallel, a New York bike messenger’s dog attacks some small Godzilla toys. (The dog was specially trained to fixate on Godzilla and cost the production $20,000 a day.) This mild mockery of disaster movies is immediately blown out of the water. The fragments of asteroid are indifferent to this charm, and tear the ground apart without remorse.
First the densely populated Grand Central Station is shattered, punctuated by a man wearing a cliched I<3NY shirt paying dearly for his adoration of the vulnerable metropolis.
Then the Empire State Building falls. Once the tallest structure in the world, its peak is knocked cleanly off by astronomical shrapnel, hobbling man’s attempts to stretch upwards.
And then presciently, a wide shot of the aftermath with smoke billowing shows the most powerful totem of American vulnerability.
The Empire State Building remained the tallest building in the world until 1970, when the first tower of the World Trade Centre took that title. The Empire State would then return to be the tallest structure in New York in 2001. This was 1998. The proudest monuments are those that would most damage national sanctity if torn down.
If the American fabric is being ripped apart, we need a crew of blue-collar boys to show an ineffectual government how to save the world. Leading the pack is a natural anchor - Bruce Willis. At this point in his career Willis is an established action star who dips into the fun stuff more than most - Death Becomes Her, Beavis and Butthead, The Fifth Element. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. Just look at his knowing smile on the cover of his debut album The Return of Bruno.
Thus, there was probably great appeal to the absurd high-concept action of oil drillers becoming astronauts. But something didn’t quite click between Mike and Bruce, leading the latter to reject the idea of the director helming Die Hard 4 in a 2007 online Q&A:
"Bay would have ruined DH4. Few people will work with him now, and I know I will never work with him again."
Along for the ride are a young Owen Wilson, squeezing out all the laid-back cowboy comedy he can; Will Patton, an estranged father who will win his young son’s recognition by being friends with Bruce Willis; Michael Clarke Duncan, the resident gentle giant whose name ‘Bear’ is almost too on-the-nose; and Steve Buscemi.
Buscemi plays Rockhound, so called simply “because he’s horny.” That was not always a central pillar of the character, however, and Buscemi signed on to the part largely because he was attracted to the idea of playing a genius geologist who had nothing in common with his growing typecast as a sleazy horndog. Once he was on board, then the horndog elements were inserted. You cannot escape it, Buscemi. That does beg the question - was the character already called Rockhound? In theory the name could just refer to a guy who loves geodes. He has two PhDs, but his supreme intellect is outweighed by his intense desire to sit on top of the nuclear bomb like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove and declare “I just wanted to feel the power between my legs.” Everything is a potential dick in this, there are so few elements that aren’t somehow turned into a dick.
There is also, of course, Ben Affleck, but we’ll get to him later. The crew is established through a series of montages that make clear the rough-and-tumble nature of earth’s saviours. Their medical examinations turn back their career of phallic penetration on them. I didn’t realise prostate exams were such a significant part of NASA training. Their psychological evaluations show each of the team getting more and more frustrated with their high-and-mighty interrogators.
The room is an Escher-style impossible wall of jagged spikes not unlike the serrated topography of the asteroid they will contend with in space. Buildings of bureaucracy are just as unfriendly to their everyman strength as an apocalyptic rock.
In exchange for their heroism, they have a list of demands, which includes.
Parking tickets wiped from record.
The return of eight-track tapes.
The truth about who killed JFK.
Use of the Lincoln bedroom of the White House for the summer.
No taxes, ever.
Don’t tread on them.
But they’re entitled to those demands, because in this world, deep-core drilling is a science and an art. And only very few have perfected it. These guys are the best of the best; the most advanced species on earth.
As much as the bizarrely-sharp cosmic colossus is the primary threat, the real antagonist is once again, the Government. Government with a capital G, which really just means anyone who curtails your freedoms or tells you to stop. Right off the rip, Harry shows this by launching golf balls from his oil rig into a nearby boat of environmentalist protesters. Nobody will stop these guys from doing what they do, they’re pirates on the open sea and they don’t need no trouble from no liberals or feds.
To be fair to them, the institutional bureaucratic chaos of the government response to the apocalypse is a particularly intense brand of uselessness. Truman (Billy Bob Thornton), noble NASA chief, explains early on that their budget only allows them to observe approximately 3% of the sky. There was therefore no federal support to prevent such a disaster from getting so close to earth. Truman has genuine faith in his team of drillers to stop the apocalypse, and fights for them to be able to complete their mission despite Defence Department interference to detonate the bomb early, before a sufficient hole has been drilled.
Leading the cabal of executive dissenters is Keith David’s General Kimsey. The conflict within the control room reaches a fever pitch concurrently with the team in space. The colossal ships battered by harsh rock are crosscut with whip-pan drama and the chaos of anguished faces and blinking lights. The fleet of g-men take over the command centre and initiate their secondary nuclear protocol. They enter their keys to remote-detonate the bomb, as the drillers in space are impotently unable to make a hole. Maybe I’m reaching with all these phallic observations, but so much of this just seems like inserting one thing into another thing.
While so much of Armageddon is the blue-collar everymen rallying against the authority of government to prove themselves, the US military did have significant approval power over the film. In return, the production was permitted to film actual shuttle launches, leading Willis to try to sneak into the shuttle. The premiere was held at the NASA Kennedy Space Centre, if that’s any indication of pride.
“You’re already heroes, just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Truman tells the crew before they leave. The interest is in pageantry above all else. The focus is on ceremony, celebrating acts of heroism regardless of results. It might be a worldwide armageddon, but primarily an American one. It’s the end of all things, but most importantly the USA.
Bay was, for a long time, chief Hollywood peddler of military agitprop, turning his various disasters (Pearl Harbor, 13 Hours) into opportunities for jingoistic celebration. To be clear, he makes his military brochures look very good, but at the heart of them is a resolute faith in the nobility of the soldier. Institutions themselves, however, are where Bay targets his skepticism.
For the sake of recruitment, I doubt this makes a dent. You sign up as a person, not an institution. You, as an individual, would be within yet outside the bureaucracy at play. Maybe you could even change it, get things done. You could be the hero, the adventurer, the saviour, the Bruce Willis. As much as Keith David might try to stop you, you could be the person who drills into a big rock and has a weird relationship with your daughter.
That last part is probably just specific to this movie, I wouldn’t imagine that’s something NASA would ask you during an interview. But this movie does, as I mentioned, occupy a larger part of their consciousness than most. Is this creepy father-daughter-son love triangle one of the mistakes trainees are supposed to identify?
I should provide some context: Bruce Willis has a daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler). He also has a de facto adopted son AJ (Ben Affleck). They are sleeping together (Grace and AJ I mean. Harry is merely an overbearing platonic third). You may have questions like: Did the two of them grow up together? Have they always been in love or just recently discovered an attraction? Do they use animal crackers in their foreplay? The answers: Unclear. Unclear. And inexplicably yes they do use animal crackers in their foreplay.
Lying idyllically in the grass, AJ considers why animal crackers are called crackers when they’re really more like cookies. What a fun and kooky cookie observation. He’s so random! He then begins speaking about animal crackers in more sultry tones and begins to move the biscuit over her body sensually, with it ending up in her pants. The romance throughline was reportedly a late inclusion to the script, but if I were writing this, animal cracker sex would be page one.
In some ways, it’s lucky that AJ was at least an age appropriate partner for Grace, because the way the rest of the crew discuss her is disturbing. Arguing with Harry about her right to find love, they say she’s allowed to get married because now she’s a “babe,” “hottie,” and “she’s exploring her body.” “We all feel like a bunch of daddies here,” is one of the more disturbing things a person can say.
Liv Tyler has had an interesting career between this, The Leftovers, and her beautiful performance in her house tour for Architecture Digest. Her father, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, features heavily on the Armageddon soundtrack, marking her nepo baby status as clearly as possible. It wasn’t a huge reach for her then, to play a young woman who’s dependent on, yet stifled by an over-involved father. I will stop the analogy there, because as much as Steven Tyler is a real piece of dirt, he doesn’t seem to harbour quite the same creepy attachment to her as her fictional father does.
“I have asked you repeatedly to call me dad.”
Her fictional suitor Ben Affleck has been through it all. Brief appearances in indie comedies led to a big breakthrough and Oscar win for original screenplay in 1997, before Armageddon launched him as an action star with brand new teeth (Affleck got new teeth during shooting, after his real set of “baby teeth” was deemed too small. He spent 8 hours a day at the dentist for a week and it cost $20,000 - between this and the godzilla dog, it seems Bay had an obsession with spending budget in $20,000 chunks). He’s been Daredevil; he’s been Batman. He’s been engaged three times (once to a woman named Jennifer, twice to another woman named Jennifer). He’s gone from some of the most critically reviled movies of the 00s, to a return to Academic praise in the 10s. And in the 20s, he has tried very, very hard to become the face of Dunkin Donuts. That honour will forever remain Al Pacino’s, sorry Ben.
This was his first blockbuster turn, and evidently he had mixed feelings about it. In the now-infamous Criterion DVD commentary (Yes that’s right - Armageddon is in the Criterion Collection), Affleck let loose. His performance in the commentary has been deemed generally critical of the movie, but what I hear is a much more affectionate teasing of the absurdity involved in making a $140 million movie. He jumps into a Sling Blade impression of Billy Bob whenever he appears on screen, which is as much accent work as it is unintelligible grunting. He also drops these nuggets:
“Michael would say ‘Ok Ben, get to the top of the tower…and just say some stuff and yell.”
“This is where you just have a random helicopter in the background for no real reason, just because you’re a big movie and you’re expensive and you can,”
This is largely a prelude to his tight-5 set on the film’s central premise. I don’t know how seriously Affleck considered stand-up as a young performer, but he delivers his jokes with a practiced intonation and small asides of “do you know what I mean?” as if speaking to an audience who are unlikely to be there with him in a recording booth.
I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers and he told me to shut the fuck up. So that was the end of that talk.
“You know, Ben, just shut up, OK? You know, this is a real plan.” I was like, “You mean it’s a real plan at NASA to train oil drillers?” and he was like, “Just shut your mouth!” See, here’s where we demonstrate that, because Bruce is gonna tell the guys that they did a bad job of building the drill tank. See, he’s a salt-of-the-earth guy and the NASA nerdonauts don’t understand his salt-of-the-earth ways, his rough-and-tumble ways. Like somehow they can build rocket ships but don’t understand what makes a good tranny? 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? “Oh one whole week? We’re gonna learn how to fly into space? I need my guys.” Why do you need ’em? “They’re the best.” Everyone’s the best. Why are they the best? “I don’t know, they just are.”
I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch, let’s face it. They don’t know jack about drilling? How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on.
Affleck’s stellar work for Criterion presents a young star with a healthy skepticism of the Hollywood machine that he would soon become so accustomed to. It’s charming to hear someone with an outsider’s perspective pre-PR brainwashing.
Being chased off a front lawn with a shotgun while your trousers are still round your ankles by the terrifying patriarch of a love interest seems like a staple of American virginity culture. You are on the property of the current owner of the object of your affection, and he is constitutionally allowed, or even required, to murder you for it. His daughter should stay in her room while this happens, it’s not about her, this is between two men.
It’s a long and beautiful tradition, and while Ben Affleck has previously in his career been chased off a front lawn with a shotgun (see below), he has never been chased off an oil rig with a shotgun. He might in fact be the first person to have this happen. Maybe there aren’t any legal restrictions to firearms on the open ocean, but even owning gunpowder on an oil rig seems like an obvious mistake.
But Harry doesn’t mind. As soon as he discovers this sexual controversy, he picks up his nearest murder weapon and goes swinging it around with gay abandon, no matter his surrounding infrastructure of dangerous chemical engineering.
Shots fire into the pipes neighbouring AJ’s head, pushing him to fire back in a much more volatile way. “Man to man, I love her,” he says, alleviating the tension and forcing the older man to recognise the younger not only as a horny teen, but as a suitor for him to give his daughter away to. Man to man. The whole practice is creepy and archaic, but we already knew that. There’s a twist though of course. What if the horny teens were essentially brother and sister? How modern!
Harry watches them kiss from the shadows, providing a very specifically confusing daddy-daughter cuck kink for the 0.1% of the film’s audience who must have finally felt so relieved to see themselves on screen. Important representation.
“You go take care of my little girl now. I always thought of you as a son, but I’d be damn proud to have you marry Grace,” he tells AJ with some of his final words. The ‘but’ is doing a lot of work there towards the implied incestuousness, that he must reluctantly accept.
Armageddon is a widely ridiculed movie, and not without reason. But the scientific nitpicks miss the point - Bay isn’t going for accuracy, he’s already moving on from that. Think fire shouldn’t ignite in space because there’s no oxygen? Who cares, those aren’t even Ben Affleck’s real teeth. Here, Bay is laying out the blueprint for his career in images that touch on, but never relent to reality. Does it matter whether Bruce Willis should be able to inexplicably cast his image to every available screen in the control room to say goodbye to his daughter when this is the resulting frame of literal lost connection?
As always, the impossible shapes of larger-than-life action are narratively in service of his human melodrama. Mike wants to remind us to hold onto those we hold dear. Especially our sister/wife and our husband/brother.
Next Up: Armageddon is shockingly not the last movie of Bay’s career to feature a dad-daughter-daughter’s boyfriend triangle of tension, and the next one only gets creepier.