So Erin and I, because we’re totally cool, spent last night watching the classic Michael Bay Classic Armageddon. I used ‘classic’ twice in that last sentence because the film is truly ‘classic’ in two ways. First, it is capital-C Classic, as proven both by its inclusion into the Criterion Collection and also by the fact that here we are, ten years later, and I’m still writing about Armageddon. Second, it’s ‘classic’ in that utterly classy way, in that this is the sort of film that is, I would argue, unabashedly perfect. So perfect, in fact, that it captured one of the most hard-to-capture eras of my generation. Like it or not, Armageddon is a definitive film. And there is no stronger evidence to the fact that there have been quite literally dozens of films that tried to work the exact same formula (both before and after Michael Bay’s opus) and none of them have achieved anywhere near the same degree of notoriety or space in the collective pop culture pantheon.

No matter what they throw at us — whether it be tornados or volcanos or giant monsters or a boat turned upside down — nothing has ever had a greater impact than this asteroid that was, and I quote, “the size of texas.”

All that said, of course, it’s a really bad film.

I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing

Roger Ebert really didn’t like Armageddon:

Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. “Armageddon” is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you’d have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.

Of course, he’s entirely right, but I swear it’s that breathlessness — the utter recklessness! — of the whole thing that makes the film so damn engaging. It’s a rare film that one can catch pretty much every plot hole, continuity mistake and just plain massive implausibility on the first viewing, but that’s only because Armageddon was written in such a way that not only did the writers not care about these flaws, they actively pursued these flaws. They wanted them. Because they make the movie cool.

After all, do you honestly think the first time Michael Bay heard the “So why did the astronauts bring a giant chain gun into space?” he smacked his forehead and yelled “damn!”? Do you think the writers were unaware of the fact that putting the Russian space station into a spin to simulate gravity while trying to dock their space shuttles was a terrible idea? Do you think William Fichtner was happy with his line reading of “He’s got SPACE DEMENTIA”? Can you honestly believe, even for a second, that over the course of this 100-million dollar production no one stopped to consider that maybe it would be easier to train astronauts to be deep core drillers than to train deep core drillers to be astronauts?

The movie revels in its own flaws and, in doing so, somehow makes a profound connection with its audience.

High School Analogues

Erin recently posted an article on The Top 10 Disney Princesses of All Time in which she listed all the princesses’ “high school equivalents.” That got me thinking, because it’s one of those sad truths that most everything that has a high school equivalent. Even summer movies.

Like, take Top Gun. It’s clearly the jock. Die Hard was the loner. Titanic was the prom queen. Beverly Hills Cop was the class clown. Total Recall was the basketcase. They all fit into their nice little high school equivalent. And I could go on. But the question I want answered is this: where does Armageddon fit?

And it doesn’t. Until you get beyond those sort of John Hughes-inspired high school archetypes and look at the new kinds of students that emerged in the 1990s. I’m talking like Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith or Richard Linklater sort of slacker cool. From them came a new kind of character, smart, often brilliantly so, and obsessed with geek pop culture, but clearly not a geek. Instead, these characters thrived on their own lackadaisicalness. It’s all about sarcasm, false bravado and feeling like there’s no where left to go in this world.

Armageddon is, I would argue, the slacker cool kid of the high school world.

Covering Five Years

Earlier in this article I said that the big dumb asteroid film “captured one of the most hard-to-capture eras of my generation.” And, indeed, I would argue that that period from 1995 from 2000, when we transitioned from Nirvana to N’Sync, from Seinfeld to Friends, and during which pretty much nothing of historical significance really happened, is pretty much impossible to categorize historically at this point. And yet, right in the middle of all that, there was Armageddon.

It’s written like the writers — all nine of them — had no real interest in telling a story that could ever happen. Nor were they interested in telling a story they thought would be good. Rather, it’s written like they pretty much just wanted to get this over with. The film features some of the worst pacing I’ve ever seen, as it compresses 70 hours of travel time into 15 minutes without so much of a slow fade out or a montage. The characters instead take off from earth, blow up a Russian space station, slingshot around the moon, and land on the infamous asteroid at breakneck speed. They literally go from one event to another without a cut in the action. At one point one of them remarks “Hey, there’s the moon.”

Action movies are generally, as a rule, big and dumb, but they’re usually ashamed of it. They try to hide their bigness and their dumbness beneath a false veneer of sincerity that, eventually, sinks the entire film. Even Michael Bay, who did so well at avoiding that here, has fallen into the exact same trap with every other film he’s done since.

And so Armageddon remains a rare thing — the slacker kid at the back of the classroom. While the all the other kids are using words like “pathos” and “denouement” he’s thinking that the easiest way to indicate that Steve Buscemi’s character is a genius is for him to say “I am a genius” repeatedly. And that wouldn’t it be awesome if, somehow, the asteroid explosion was seen simultaneously in the sky from every city on the planet. Or that, yes, c’mon, why would you put a bunch of people inside NASA headquarters and not have them wearing jumpsuits all the time? They need to have jumpsuits.

It’s a big rock hurtling through space. America’s going to blow it up. It’s a metaphor for a big rock, hurtling through space. That America’s going to blow up. It’s the kind of fractured simplicity that took us from Heart Shaped Box to Bye Bye Bye. A testament to the fact that somewhere along the lines we started to see effort as kind of lame. It’s Armageddon and I’ll probably watch it again.

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