Armageddon (1998)

It's the most tender tale of man-on-man love since Hyacinthus and Apollo.

Armageddon (1998)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Jonathan Hensleigh and J.J. Abrams; plus Robert Roy Poole, Tony Gilroy, Shane Salerno, John the Revelator, and Nosteradomus

Before we begin, a warning: This movie is 2 hours and 31 minutes long, so Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

A hail of flaming meteorites bombard New York City, cratering Broadway, decapitating the Chrysler Building, demolishing Grand Central Terminal, and wreaking a toll in human lives and suffering the like of which has not been seen since Cats opened at the Winter Garden.

Meanwhile, at NASA headquarters, the homicidal simpleton from Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton) is in charge, and he announces that an asteroid will strike Earth in 18 days, destroying all life. “Not even bacteria” will survive, he informs the President, implying that the asteroid is a far more effective toilet bowl cleanser than Lysol.

Cut to an oil-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, where Bruce Willis is pelting a Greenpeace boat with golf balls. Bruce represents the last of a vanishing breed of wildcat oilmen, rugged individualists who live life by their own rules, as they carelessly rape the fragile ecosystem. And yet, when he finds his daughter (Liv Tyler) in bed with Ben Affleck, he shows a surprisingly sensitive side by attempting to blow Ben’s head off with a shotgun. This tender scene is interrupted when black crude starts gushing all over the cast in a series of dizzying, rapidly-edited images intended to convey that they’ve just struck oil, or maybe to induce epileptic seizures in Japanese schoolchildren.

Billy Bob decides to send Bruce and his team of handpicked stereotypes into space, where they’ll land on the asteroid, drill an 800-foot hole, and explode a nuclear warhead. There follows a series of light-hearted scenes in which Bruce and his crew of dullards comically exasperate the NASA brass with their sociopathic fetishes, gross ignorance, and inappropriate body-fat content.

Now comes the scariest part of the film, as Bruce secretly watches while Liv and Ben make out. Granted, their necking consists largely of Ben licking her left shoulder blade, but still—he’s her father! and he’s just standing there! Watching! I once dissected a fetal pig in a poorly ventilated classroom when I had the flu, and felt less queasy than this.

That is, until the next scene, when we watch as Ben attempts to seduce Liv by molesting her with animal crackers, and talking in the voice of that Crocodile Hunter guy from the Discovery Channel. For some reason, this actually works.

Cut to Shanghai, where a gigantic meteorite kills millions. But the previous two scenes have left the audience so shaken and depressed that we can’t help envying the dead.

Cut to Cape Canaveral, where Bruce and company are suited up and heading for the launch pad. But first, Ben and Liv pause to sing an off-key rendition of “I’m Leaving on a Jetplane,” and suddenly, the audience shakes off its mood of apathetic despair and begins actively rooting for the asteroid.

The team has to take two shuttles, because everyone whined about wanting to sit by the window. They strap in, heroic music starts to blare, and the shuttles blast off! At last we’ve got some action! Which comes to an instant halt as they pull into the Mir for gas. (You’d think they might have thought of that before they left.)

Ben screws up the refueling, sets everything on fire, and blows up the space station. On the ground, Liv pensively removes her engagement ring and entertains second thoughts.

Finally, the two shuttles approach the asteroid from upwind. Predictably, Ben’s ship crashes headlong into it, while Bruce’s shuttle lands in the wrong place.

Ben loads the survivors in their self-propelled drill rig, which is also equipped with a high caliber gatling gun (apparently, they expected the asteroid to fight back). “I’ll show you how we do things where I come from,” he bellows, and fires off five thousand rounds from the machine gun while inside the shuttle, then drives the drill rig through a wall. So apparently he comes from Texas.

Cut to Bruce and crew, who are saying things like “Drop the hammer!” and “Let’s chew this iron bitch up!” in an effort to make digging a hole seem exciting. But all they manage to do is blow the drill rig’s transmission, and the audience is filled with dread by the prospect that at any moment, James Brolin may appear on behalf of Aamco.

Some of the cast members stage a coup, and try to save their careers by just detonating the nukes and ending the movie right here. But, as with everything else, they screw it up, and we’ve got another 42 minutes to go.

Eventually, Ben shows up in the second drill-rig and finishes the hole. During all the ruckus and horseplay, however, they damage the bomb, and can no longer detonate it by remote control. Unsurprisingly, Ben is chosen to stay behind and blow up the asteroid, since he’s destroyed just about everything else in the film. But Bruce, who hasn’t really had much to do, is so sick of it all he decides that he wants to stay behind and touch off the nuke. He and Ben cry and scream that they love each other, in a moment reminiscent of two fishwives performing a scene from Spartacus.

The survivors lift off, and Bruce presses the button that controls the bomb (it also apparently controls a slide projector, since along with the explosion we get a montage of Bruce’s vacation snaps.)

The crew returns to earth as heroes, the saviors of mankind. Despite this, their shuttle gets a crappy parking place, and they have to walk all the way back to the terminal.

Armageddon has been dismissed as a typically mindless summer movie, but serious critics regard it as the most tender tale of man-on-man love since Hyacinthus and Apollo. The story describes the classic love triangle; in this case, the Athenian paradigm of a mature man besotted with a callow youth, who is in turn tempted by the soft and relatively unwhiskery flesh of Woman (it’s basically a remake of the intimate 1971 British drama Sunday, Bloody Sunday, except with asteroids and space shuttles).

After a shocking opening in which flaming orbs fall from the sky and emasculate the Chrysler building (a likely reference to Freud’s concept of the “castrating mother”), we cut to a drill rig (probably the name of a gay bar on First Avenue) where Bruce finds Ben in bed with Liv, and nearly commits a crime of passion by chasing Ben all over the place with a shotgun in a scene that screams “If I can’t have you, nobody can!”

Later, with the world in peril, the two lovers are unexpectedly reunited. Ben coquettishly teases Bruce by letting him peep while Ben makes out with Bruce’s daughter; skillfully leavening a common male fantasy—watching while your girl- friend heavily pets with another woman—with a refreshing splash of incest. Alas, the reconciliation fails when Ben can’t go through with the sex, and is reduced to desperate attempts to satisfy Liv by using Animal Crackers as sex toys (the Bunny works best)...

Realizing that the heterosexual subplot is fooling nobody, director Michael Bay thankfully allows Liv to pull off her beard (and her engagement ring). The two unsuccessful lovers finally bond Will and Grace-style as they bring NASA’s desperate, last ditch effort to save humanity to a crashing halt with a campy musical comedy number that makes Dames at Sea look like Battleship Potemkin.

While the director continues to throw the occasional bone to the straight members of the audience (huge drill bits plunge deep and hard and “chew this iron bitch up!” in an obvious metaphor for rough sex with Margaret Thatcher) the remainder of the movie is dedicated to resolving the Bruce-Ben love story. And like all great love stories of amor and passion, it ends tragically, with one lover sobbing and moaning like La Llorna, and the other blowing himself up with an atom bomb so he can get some peace.