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ARMAGEDDON is a meteor storm of action-adventure moviemaking that has you on the edge of your seat forgetting to breathe! When NASA’s executive director, Dan Truman (Thornton), realizes the Earth has 18 days before it’s obliterated by a meteor the size of Texas, he has only one option — land a ragtag team of roughneck oil drillers on the asteroid and drop a nuclear warhead into its core. Spectacular special effects, laugh-out-loud humor, great characters, riveting storytelling, and heartfelt emotion make ARMAGEDDON an exhilarating thrill ride you’ll want to experience like there’s no tomorrow. Actors Bruce Willis Billy Bob Thornton Liv Tyler Ben Affleck Will Patton Peter Stormare Keith David Steve Buscemi Director Michael Bay Producers Jerry Bruckheimer Gale Anne Hurd Michael Bay Writers Robert Roy Pool Jonathan Hensleigh J.J. Abrams Genres Action & adventure Support YouTube Help Center
Source: Armageddon
About the Movie
An asteroid the size of Texas is eighteen days from hitting Earth, and NASA’s plan is as desperate as it is simple: land on it, drill 800 feet down, and split it with a nuclear bomb. The problem is that no astronaut can drill like Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), the world’s best deep-core oil driller — so NASA recruits Harry and his roughneck crew, trains them in a matter of days, and launches them in two shuttles to do a blue-collar job in the least blue-collar place imaginable.
Between the training montages and Aerosmith on the soundtrack, the mission hits every disaster the odds can supply: a refueling station in flames, a crash-landing on the asteroid’s iron plateaus, a bomb that will not arm itself. And beneath the spectacle is a simpler story, of a father trying to get his crew — including the young driller (Ben Affleck) who loves his daughter (Liv Tyler) against his wishes — home alive.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Armageddon was the biggest worldwide box-office hit of 1998 and, with Deep Impact the same year, fixed the asteroid-disaster film as a permanent genre — the direct descendant of 1979’s Meteor (also featured on this site) and the template planetary-defense stories still follow. Michael Bay’s rapid-fire style defined the look of blockbuster action for a decade, and the film’s blue-collar-heroes premise — that the fate of the world might hinge on working people, not just astronauts — became one of the era’s defining pop-culture statements. Scientists cheerfully list its physics violations; audiences, then and now, do not care. It even made it into the Criterion Collection.
