Armageddon (1998)

There is a moment in Armageddon where a man is drilling a hole in an asteroid to save the entire human race, tears streaming down his face, as a power ballad swells on the soundtrack, and you have two choices: laugh it off, or let it take you. Michael Bay dares you not to feel something. And here is the thing, the deeply embarrassing, hard-to-defend thing: it works on me. It has always worked on me.

This is peak Bay. Loud, flashy, emotionally over-the-top, and packed with enough explosions to level several planets. Bruce Willis leads a crew of roughneck oil drillers turned astronauts on a mission to stop a Texas-sized asteroid from wiping out civilisation. Written down like that, it sounds like the pitch a child would scrawl on a napkin. But the film commits to it so completely, with such shameless, all-in conviction, that the absurdity becomes part of the appeal. You cannot make something this maximalist by half-measures. Bay knows exactly what kind of film he is making and he makes it at full volume.

It is not subtle. It is not smart. It is not, in any conceivable universe, realistic. The science is nonsense, the logic is borrowed, and the two-and-a-half-hour runtime leaves space for a training montage, approximately forty last-minute heroics, tearful goodbyes, and somehow a wedding in the middle of an extinction-level emergency. The plot is predictable from the opening frame. And yet I sat there, both times I watched it as a kid and again revisiting it now, genuinely invested.

Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler's love story is the weakest link. It plays like a soap opera insert, all soft lighting and longing looks, and the romantic subplot between asteroid set pieces feels bolted on rather than woven in. If the film has a genuine emotional centre it is the relationship between Willis and Affleck's characters, the father-figure dynamic that gives the ending its only real weight. That is where the heart actually lives, underneath all the noise.

And then there is the soundtrack. Specifically, there is Aerosmith. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" is one of those songs that should not work as well as it does. It is operatic and overwrought and absolutely in keeping with the film's philosophy of more being more. But it is also genuinely haunting, perfectly placed, and it turns what ought to be pure schlock into something oddly touching. It is the soul of the whole enterprise. I find myself thinking about this more than I probably should: big rock bands simply do not make those iconic, era-defining movie songs anymore. We get forgettable pop remixes or safe orchestral swells, and something has genuinely been lost. The power-ballad soundtrack era died quietly and nobody held a funeral.

Bay would push this kind of filmmaking further and further in the years that followed. I wrote about where that road eventually leads when I reviewed Transformers (2007), and honestly Armageddon looks restrained by comparison. Here there is at least a human story rattling around inside the machine, characters you can name without checking Wikipedia, and a Willis performance that carries real roughneck charm. It is not the relentless sensory punishment of his later work. It still remembers to be a film about people.

Flawed, silly, and deeply cheesy, but undeniably entertaining in a way that demands a big screen and ideally a crowd. There is something to be said for a blockbuster that wears its emotions on its sleeve without apology, that would rather make you cry ugly tears over a man on an asteroid than leave you feeling nothing at all. Armageddon is not great cinema. But it is a cultural moment, a specific flavour of late-nineties American spectacle that you cannot replicate and probably could not get made now. For better or worse, I cannot fully bring myself to miss a thing about it.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1998  | Watched: 2025-11-03

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Rakuten TV
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: fuboTV · YouTube TV
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Physical: Amazon US

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