1998 in Review: "Armageddon"
Yes, it's great, but it's also the author of all our pain
Let’s start at the end. In the final few minutes of Armageddon, the surviving crew of the mission to blow up that asteroid the size of Texas and save every human, animal, and bacterial resident of Earth are about to touch down on the runway at Johnson Space Station. It was a rough go, but now all is well. The day has officially been saved.
Except there’s a little turbulence on the way down. The triumphant score shifts momentarily to the tense pulsing of strings. All of a sudden, we’re back in an action sequence. “I never told anyone this before, but I hate flying,” says Chick (Will Patton), “so it’d be an awful shame to die now.” The moment doesn’t last. Rock Hound (Steve Buscemi) responds with a punchline about owing money to a loan shark, and then the swooning score returns. The plane touches down safely.
Why would director Michael Bay do this? Why make the audience think the ship is going to crash after all they endured? Why shift to a brief, utterly meaningless moment of tension and then swerve right out of it? Because he can’t help himself, that’s why. Because he’s Michael Bay, and he never met an explosion that couldn’t be bigger, a man that couldn’t be brawnier, or a flag whose colors couldn’t be more true. In Armageddon, there is no obstacle he can’t throw into the path of his heroes.
Armageddon is his masterpiece not just because it’s his biggest film—in scope, imagination, and budget—but because it’s the perfect expression of his “vulgar auteurist” aesthetic. He has no use for taste or subtlety, and has no interest in winning the approval of the critical community. I’m not even entirely sure he cares about the viewers. When he does something, he does it his way and all the way, and there’s no more “his way and all the way” than Armageddon.
You may not like his films, but they are distinctly his. Consider the frequent cutaways to regular American citizens listening to the president’s speech over the radio or preparing for the asteroid’s impact by running into a storm cellar. There is no CGI involved in these shots, but they are somehow even less realistic than the asteroid surface. There are little kids in overalls drinking Coke from glass bottles and a woman sitting on the hood of an old, rusted Chevrolet while the sun sets over the cornfield. I was surprised there was no hobo wearing a barrel. This is Americana, not America, and you won’t be the least bit surprised to learn Michael Bay never spent a minute in the Midwest. He grew up in Los Angeles and went to college in Connecticut, so his idea of the heartland mostly derives from other movies, or perhaps Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad.
No one else would have done it this way. No one else would have contrasted the biggest explosions cinema had ever produced with Depression-era portraits of middle America. Armageddon is a story about how America saves the world, and Bay delved into the past for imagery to paint a world that was worth saving. It’s a dumb, reactionary vision, but at least it’s his.
As is his plot, which piles one obstacle on top of another until it reaches an absurdist pitch. Every moment—at least from the time the mission begins—is more tense than the last. There’s a simple refuel at the International Space Station that turns into a race against the clock and an explosion that nearly ends the mission when it has just begun; an asteroid landing, in which one of the two rockets crashes after colliding with debris NASA predicted would be cleared by the moon’s gravity; an overshot of the other rocket’s landing spot, which places them on a nearly impenetrable iron plate instead of more fertile ground for digging; a Grand Canyon-sized hole that our heroes must somehow leapfrog; a president who gets antsy and tries to blow up the nuke before they get it in the ground; a horny astronaut with space dementia; deadly gas pockets; and finally a broken detonator that requires one astronaut to stay behind and sacrifice his own life to save the world.
It’s like a game of whack-a-mole for the skeptical viewer. In the time it takes you to shoot down a plot hole or laugh at an absurdity, Bay is already onto the next one. Our last president used the same strategy.
In its employment of every action trope devised and enacted in the prior two decades, Armageddon serves as a sort of elegy—or at least, retirement ceremony—for a certain kind of big-budget action movie. A year later, The Matrix would come out and change everything about what we considered cool. A couple years after that, The Bourne Identity changed how action sequences were shot, with an eye towards realism rather than sensationalism. In 2005, Batman Begins traded sunny optimism for brooding, introspective heroes. That was it for a while.
In another sense, Armageddon has a bigger legacy than all of them. See, the thing I haven’t mentioned is how comedic it is. Not necessarily “funny,” as your mileage will vary on that. But it looks for comedy beats wherever it can find them. The film’s first half is a fish-out-of-water comedy with this crew of roughnecks pushing back against the nerds at NASA with their rock-and-roll antics. The training montages, where their bodies and minds are pushed to the limit in a series of grueling tests, mostly function as opportunities for body humor and deadpan quips. I’m particularly fond of the exchange in which Owen Wilson asks the crew chief what it’s going to be like on the asteroid surface, and when he responds with a list of terrifying scenarios, Wilson responds, “Okay, so the scariest environment imaginable. That’s all you’ve got to say, scariest environment imaginable.” It’s a moment that no one could sell better than Wilson, so Bay deserves credit for finding the right actors—Wilson was hardly a household name at this time—and letting them cook.
In this movie, everyone gets to be funny. Action movies used to have a single performer serve as comic relief (think Tom Arnold in True Lies), while the muscle-bound star would get off an occasional zinger. But in Armageddon, there’s a full roster of comic relief. Wilson and Steve Buscemi had the comic bonafides, and each one has a zero-percent miss rate here. But Michael Clarke Duncan and Ken Hudson Campbell—the big guys—are also hilarious. Every single thing that Peter Stormare, as the kooky cosmonaut, says is funny. Bruce Willis himself gets off a few good one-liners and employs his trademark smirk as a weapon against existential terror. In fact, the only one who really doesn’t get to be funny is Ben Affleck, but he sure tries. There’s a strangely Seinfeldian observation from him about how animal crackers aren’t really crackers because you can’t put cheese on them.
This emphasis on laughs is not Bay’s innovation. Two years earlier, Independence Day featured a comic relief part (Judd Hirsch), but it also prioritized comedy in its bit parts (Harvey Fierstein) and still let its stars (Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum) get laughs. 1997’s Con Air basically did the same thing, employing Dave Chappelle as a pure joke-maker while also turning its central villain, played by John Malkovich, into the funniest serial killer you’ll ever meet. Still, Armageddon did it biggest and best, and the echoes of its approach can be heard in the subsequent decades, when comic book movies, particularly those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, turned each of its characters into comic relief.
Think about this: What’s the difference between Guardians of the Galaxy and Armageddon? Both revolve around space crews that have become family to each other. They both save the world. Everyone is funny on these crews, including the guy who just says, “I am Groot.” Armageddon even has a ‘70s-centric soundtrack, with Bob Seger, Curtis Mayfield, and Aerosmith all prominently featured. There are no space creatures in Armageddon, but I have a distinct feeling Bay would have put them in there if he could have found a way. He’ll have to settle for making one of the best and most influential films of the 1990s, a movie so consistently silly that it dares you to mock it, a film so hell-bent on entertaining, amusing, and terrifying you that it doesn’t care how silly and schmaltzy you might think it is. You’re the NASA scientist, and it’s aiming for the roughnecks. Scoff all you want, Armageddon doesn’t know how to fail.