With voiceover by Charlton Heston commemorating the extinction of the dinosaurs and warning of the possibility of another deadly meteorite hitting Earth, the highest-grossing film of 1998 began. The title “Armageddon” exploded upon its release on screen, immediately giving way to the name of the blockbuster’s title star, Bruce Willis. This month of July (July 1st in his home country, July 17th in Spain) marks the 25th anniversary of the arrival of the blockbuster, which marked a new milestone in the spectacular escalation of 1990s summer cinema towards explosive orgy, catastrophe, impossible plots and patriotic epic. The apotheosis of what is so often categorized as “American,” to whose snide accusation director Michael Bay seemingly responded with a head held high, and featured countless shots of the waving American flag throughout the footage.
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If it weren’t for its adrenaline-charged and hysterical pace, with cuts that are usually a maximum of two to three seconds long, the film would be in the spirit of the so-called “Elternkino”. Ringer critic Kevin Clark stated, “Normal men [y maduros] facing extraordinary situations” are “the soul of the genre”. And that’s what Armageddon clearly offers: an enthusiastic enthusiasm for the perpetual worker who puts in his place the Washington boss and the smartass NASA to personally fly into space to “kick that asteroid’s ass” that threatens to wipe out humanity. The chilling terms the plot moves in are as follows: A meteorite “the size of the state of Texas” – the unit used in the US to express how many Bernabéus football stadiums cover an area – is heading towards our planet, and the only way to stop it is to detonate a bomb inside it. To this end, NASA recruits the boss of an oil company (Willis) who puts his workers into the service of the mission “on condition that they pay no further taxes”.
“I asked Michael Bay why it was easier to teach drillers how to be an astronaut than to teach astronauts to drill, and he told me to shut the fuck up,” recalled Ben Affleck, the film’s other star, in the DVD comments, whose relationship with the character Liv Tyler, Willis’ fictional daughter, provides the romantic plot; Glob was added by uncredited screenwriter Scott Rosenberg following the success of Titanic (1997). Like Affleck, most of the critics of the time hit the wall headfirst when they tried to analyze from a rational point of view the confrontation of these screaming drills with a meteorite with its own gravity, which, by the way, has earthquakes or episodes of special dementia, or they are confronted with episodes of special dementia, a disease invented in the script and based on the fact that exposure to space provokes manic violence in some people.
But for the writer, emotion and spectacle seemed to matter most: “I know there can’t be fire in space, but it’s a movie,” Bay argued, also in the domestic edition’s extra content, in which producer Jerry Bruckheimer complimented the filmmaker’s ability to “think like a 14-year-old boy.” Bruckheimer was the godfather of Bay, a director from the video clip world, in his previous two films: Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996).
No room for more flags: Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck, in a scene from the film.IFA Film (United Archives / Cordon Press)
The film, which cost 140 million dollars, grossed more than 550 million worldwide and thus clearly surpassed its direct competitor, the equally successful Deep Impact, which was released in cinemas in May 1998 and is also about a menacing asteroid. However, the Mimi Leder-directed production was held in higher esteem by the scientific community (NASA, who worked on Armageddon, hoping that the film would be as useful for recruiting new recruits as Top Gun: Air Idols was for the Navy in 1986, added a message at the end of Bay’s film clarifying that it did not endorse the content or the portrayal of its professionals). It was the last major action hero role for Bruce Willis, who received major press the following year for The Sixth Sense (1999), and the band Aerosmith managed to top the Billboard best-selling singles chart for the first and last time in their career thanks to the tale’s ubiquitous ballad I don’t wanna miss a thing. It’s all in the family: In case anyone didn’t know, singer Steven Tyler is Liv Tyler’s real father.
auteur cinema
“It’s a pivotal film alongside Independence Day [1996, del gran rival de Bay en materia de catástrofes: Roland Emmerich]to understand the evolution of a blockbuster adventure into a more hyper-spectacular genre filled with mayhem and special effects. It’s having a crucial impact on what we’re diving into now. Without those long sequences of destruction and action, you can’t understand Marvel movies, for example,” Yago Paris, a PhD researcher in film studies who has a dissertation on Michael Bay in development, tells ICON.
According to the fellow critic, the director, whom he sees as “the clear heir to Tony Scott” – responsible for the aforementioned Top Gun and another great character Bruckheimer trusted – has not received the credit he deserves for creating a cinema so often reduced to clichés, such as his penchant for “devoting himself to destroying things” or the frenzy of his images, always accompanied by incidental music and a culture of attention-deficit and sensory overload connected. “Armageddon is the first 150-minute trailer, an assault on the eyes, ears, brain and common sense,” said popular film journalist Roger Ebert at the time.
“Even if he’s recognized as a writer, he’s still considered a bad writer to look down on,” adds Paris. “Whoever defends him does so out of cool cynicism, he is not taken seriously. The lack of a bibliography on him strikes me as glaring.” One of the few works seriously devoted to the work of the man also responsible for the Transformers saga is Michael F-ing Bay: The Unheralded Genius of Michael Bay Films (unreleased in Spain, the translation would be The f*cking Michael Bay: The Unexpected Genius of Michael Bay Films), published in 2014 by screenwriter Adam Mallinger, better known as The Bitter Script Reader, who explains, that he wrote it to give Bay “the benefit of the doubt that maybe in time you’ll know what you’re doing”. “Professional critics have insisted on the visual style of the video clips, full of quick cuts, moving shots and horny women. But while commercial success and meaningful art don’t have to go hand in hand, can a filmmaker always hit the mark with audiences without doing anything artistically right?” he asks in the book.
Michael Bay at the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix in May 2022. Mark Thompson (Getty Images)
They’re not the only ones breaking out from the old negative consensus against the director, which has been somewhat outdated in recent years, as evidenced by the most positive reception they’ve seen in the last decade. Pain and Money (2013) or 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016). The Criterion Collection, the renowned label dedicated to the distribution of “important classic and contemporary films”, included the title in its selection, joining other titles in the catalog such as “The 400 Blows” (1959) or “Persona” (1966). “Armageddon is a work of art by an avant-garde artist who is a master of movement, light, color and form, as well as chaos, glare and explosion,” says film historian Jeanine Basinger in her essay for Criterion. “It’s never confusing, it’s never boring, and it’s never less than a brilliant combination of what films are supposed to do: tell a good story, represent characters through actions, evoke emotional response, and entertain simply and to the point without being overbearing.”
With JJ Abrams, the co-creator of Lost (2004-2010) and the latest Star Wars trilogy, among its writers, Armageddon also shaped the careers of its dense cast. The film not only expanded the legend of Bruce Willis, already retired because he suffered from frontotemporal dementia, but also boosted the commercial development of young people like Affleck, Tyler or Owen Wilson, reinforced Steve Buscemi, Billy Bob Thornton or Peter Stormare (whose performance with an imposter accent was described by the author Brandon Zachary as “the most caricatured portrayal of a Russian since the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle”) as a luxurious supporting part roles and part-time indie film muse, and he also discovered the late Michael Clarke Duncan, who had his first big break there and was nominated for an Oscar for The Green Mile (1999) a year later.
In 2013, a misunderstanding with a Miami Herald journalist led to the media releasing information attributing to Michael Bay a sentence repenting of Armageddon and apparently justifying his artistic achievements by the speed at which it was carried out, namely 16 weeks. The joy among his critics was short-lived. As soon as the interview was published, Michael Bay took to his blog to state that he regretted having had so little time to perfect the editing, particularly his third act. Come on, Bruce Willis didn’t save us by getting inside a meteorite to bow his head now: “It’s one of the most aired movies in television history. I am proud. I will never apologize in the slightest for Armageddon.
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