Armageddon (1998)

After discovering that an asteroid the size of Texas is going to impact Earth in less than a month, N.A.S.A. recruits a misfit team of deep core drillers to save the planet.

Director:

Michael Bay

Writers:

Jonathan Hensleigh (screenplay), J.J. Abrams (screenplay)

Stars:

Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck

Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 15 wins & 36 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Bruce Willis	...	Harry S. 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
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

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, the asteroid is still heading towards the Earth. When...

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Plot Keywords:

asteroid | astronaut | outer space | bomb | meteorite | 

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Taglines:

For Love. For Honor. For Mankind.

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Genres:

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi | Thriller

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi disaster action, sensuality and brief language

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English Russian Indonesian

Release Date:

1 July 1998 (USA)

Also Known As:

Armageddon

Filming Locations:

Los Angeles Theatre - 615 S. Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$140,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$36,089,972, 5 July 1998, Wide Release

Gross USA:

$201,573,391, 6 December 1998

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$553,709,788, 12 August 2012

Company Credits

Production Co:

Touchstone Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Valhalla Motion Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

151 min 153 min (director's cut)

Sound Mix:

DTS Dolby Digital SDDS

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.39 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The film crew was also allowed to shoot sequences at the top of a real launch pad, with an actual space shuttle docked to it. The only condition was that they not step into the shuttle itself. Ben Affleck admitted to stepping inside the orbiter for a brief moment, before N.A.S.A. technicians ordered him out of the spacecraft.

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Goofs

When Sharpe retrieves the pistol from the safe, it is laying loose in the safe. It would need to be secured inside to keep it from being damaged and prevent an accidental discharge from it floating around in space, being banged against the safe's walls.

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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 ...

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Crazy Credits

All initial UK '12' Certificate videos came with the full promo video for Aerosmith's: "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" before the film started. The video only came with the limited widescreen or even more limited 'double feature' boxed video with 'The Making of Armaggedon' as a bonus video. Also some outtakes (1 per character) were featured at the very end of the credits with text underneath saying 'In loving memory of who gave his life saving our planet.' (The outtakes only came with the initial copies on video.)

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Alternate Versions

Criterion's two-DVDs version features the longer director's cut with added dialogue and footage, including a scene between Harry Stamper and his father (played by Lawrence Tierney.) A second DVD with supplemental material is included, with additional deleted scenes, outtakes and bloopers.

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Connections

Referenced in Top 5 Best/Worst: Top 5 Worst Michael Bay Movies (2017)

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Soundtracks

When The Rainbow Comes
Written by Karl Wallinger
Performed by Shawn Colvin
Courtesy of Columbia Records

User Reviews

The Good & Bad Of 'Armageddon'

This could have been super but, as with the case of most modern action films, the action is way overdone. Still, it had its moments.....

THE BAD -One word describes a lot of scenes in here: chaos. Things are blown up all over the place, people are shouting everywhere. It gets to be too much, especially in the last hour which gets ludicrous. You practically have a headache when you're finished watching the 150 minutes of mayhem.

Half of the disasters that happen to the astronauts were not needed, and many of them come one after the other. It wound up muddling the story. Do today's filmmakers think you have to have something dramatic and loud every two minutes to keep their audiences? And talk about loud.....holy eardrums, Bataman, you could be deaf listening to this movie which includes a lot of loud heavy-metal "music." It's too noisy.

There are touches of "Independence Day" mentality with very unrealistic with a veteran astronaut smuggling a gun on board a ship; the daughter of the one of the astronauts barging into the command center and shoving the center's leader in the middle of a crisis (in reality, she wouldn't be allowed in the room to begin with); and the usual last-second impossible heroics. I mean, sometimes I swear I was watching a movie made specifically for morons. Speaking of stupid, what was that goofy cosmonaut character (Peter Stormare) all about. That's just another example of what I was just talking about - totally unrealistic people. Why does Hollywood like to portray astronauts - some of the classiest, most educated and reserved people in the world - in such a negative light? Just another of its sicknesses, I guess where good is bad and bad is good.

THE GOOD - What was great to watch in this film were the special-effects, especially the disaster scenes with the meteors hitting the earth. They were spectacular. A few of the panoramic scenes in here were beautiful, too. (This is a must for widescreen DVD.)

There is a good mix of humor in this adventure thriller. That humor makes some of the characters likable, even though they are still unrealistically sleazy heroes. Steve Buscemi had most of the good comedic lines. I liked Billy Bob Thornton as the NASA boss. He's very interesting to watch. Bruce Willis plays his normal macho-hero role. His heroic effort in the end is nicely sentimental. The special-effects, as mentioned earlier, were perhaps the best right in the first 5-10 minutes of the film - a real attention-grabber right off the bat. Actually, the first half of this film is far better than the second half.