Armageddon

July 1st, 1998







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Armageddon

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Still of Bruce Willis in ArmageddonStill of Bruce Willis in ArmageddonGarcelle Beauvais at event of ArmageddonArmageddonStill of Ben Affleck and William Fichtner in ArmageddonStill of Liv Tyler, Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton in Armageddon

Plot
When an asteroid the size of Texas is headed for Earth the world's best deep core drilling team is sent to nuke the rock from the inside.

Release Year: 1998

Rating: 6.3/10 (161,744 voted)

Critic's Score: 42/100

Director: Michael Bay

Stars: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck

Storyline
It is just another day at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a few astronauts were repairing a satellite until, out of nowhere, a series of asteroids came crashing into the shuttle, destroying it. These asteroids also decimated New York soon thereafter. Then, NASA discovered that there is an asteroid roughly the size of Texas heading towards the Earth, and when it does hit the Earth, the planet itself and all of its inhabitants will be obliterated, worse, the asteroid will hit the Earth in 18 days. Unfortunately, NASA's plans to destroy the asteroid are irrelevant. That is when the U.S. military decides to use a nuclear warhead to blow the asteroid to pieces. Then, scientists decide to blow the asteroid with the warhead inside the asteroid itself. The only man to do it, is an oil driller named Harry Stamper and his group of misfit drillers and geologists. As he and his drill team prepare for space excavation...

Writers: Jonathan Hensleigh, J.J. Abrams

Cast:
Bruce Willis - Harry Stamper
Billy Bob Thornton - Dan Truman
Ben Affleck - A.J. Frost
Liv Tyler - Grace Stamper
Will Patton - Chick
Steve Buscemi - Rockhound
William Fichtner - Colonel Willie Sharp
Owen Wilson - Oscar Choi
Michael Clarke Duncan - Bear
Peter Stormare - Lev Andropov
Ken Hudson Campbell - Max (as Ken Campbell)
Jessica Steen - Co-Pilot Jennifer Watts
Keith David - General Kimsey
Chris Ellis - Flight Director Clark
Jason Isaacs - Ronald Quincy

Taglines: All the time in the world is all they've got.

Release Date: 1 July 1998

Filming Locations: 4th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA

Box Office Details

Budget: $140,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: $36,089,972 (USA) (5 July 1998) (3127 Screens)

Gross: $251,200,000 (Worldwide) (20 December 1998) (except USA)



Technical Specs

Runtime:  | USA: (director's cut)



Did You Know?

Trivia:
Bruce Willis had a picture of his daughters in front of him to help him cry during his goodbye to Grace.

Goofs:
Continuity: A.J. goes down the hole to cut a piece of pipe away. We cut to Harry and the Col. William Sharp yelling at him to come out. Meanwhile, A.J. is just starting to cut the same pipe again.

Quotes:
[first lines]
[Camera shoots past the moon to slowly zoom in on the Earth]
Narrator: This is the Earth, at a time when the dinosaurs roamed a lush and fertile planet.
[From behind the camera, a giant asteroid appears, speeding towards the Earth ahead of it]
Narrator: A piece of rock just 6 miles wide changed all that.
[Blazing through the atmosphere, the asteroid impacts with a spectacular display of fire and destruction]
Narrator: It hit with the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons. A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere, creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years. It happened before. It will happen again. It's just a question of when.



User Review

My Ultimate Guilty Pleasure- how do you assign a rating to that?

Rating: 8/10

This movie is my ultimate guilty pleasure. It's inane, manipulative, has hyperactive cutting, a ton of glaring inaccuracies (pointless to even discuss or debate), and probably 29 other glaring faults. And why in every dramatic slow-mo emo shot are there 3 helicopters flying in unison overhead? What's the point of having 3 helicopters flying really close together? Who cares! It looks cool. If one day I am having a heartfelt talk with my daughter, I hope there are 3 helicopters flying overhead to really 'bring it home' (and Aerosmith performing in the background.)

Despite it all, I still love watching this movie. Anytime it is on TV I can watch it 'til the end. Bruce Willis does a great job doing his Bruce Willis 'thing' (smart alecky tough guy), and the supporting cast is really great. Steve Buschemi in particular gets the best lines. An awesome assortment of ragtag castoffs (spitting funny one-liners) must save the world- who would have thunk it?

I think Armageddon was actually conceived by suits in a studio office (no really, I read that in a magazine), which is I guess another strike against it. Yet only a bunch of suits could come up with a 'high concept' like this (so high it's basically a parody by itself.) And only a director like Michael Bay could make it. He's far more suited to these types of movies, rather than big historical epics like PEARL HARBOR (which I really, really disliked.)

I read somewhere once that this movie is as close as Hollywood gets to pure cinema, in that it is basically completely divorced from reality of any kind. Is that good or bad? I don't know. I do think if you're going to ditch convention and any semblance to reality, you may as well go all the way. It's better than having something that is a confused mess that tries to be different things (Pearl Harbor.) There will be no 'it could really happen!' here.

So after all this, believe it or not I am going to give this movie a big fat whopping 8. Why? Because IMO it unabashedly succeeds at what it tries to set out to be, whatever that is. That makes no sense, since I am basically saying by all logical accounts this movie may actually suck, yet I am giving it a 8. But hey I loved this movie.





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