Armageddon: Good lord what a turkey!

Cafe Society
21

I thought that was the outer shell of the vehicle in The Core, another turkey if ever there was one.
In addition to the nitpicks pointed out here and at The Bad Astronomer’s site, I’d like to add these:

  • in the opening sequence, supposedly showing the K-T impact event - sorry fellas, you got the paleogeography wrong. Florida didn’t exist yet, the Yucatan didn’t look like the modern Yucatan, and where the hell was the Cretaceous Interior Seaway (big, wide strip of ocean that should have run up through the middle of North America)?

  • when Steve Buscemi gives his little speech about why the spot the shuttle ended up on is a bad thing, he says they landed on “compressed iron ferrite” - Okay now, a) ferrite is a form of iron, so “iron ferrite” is redundant; b) the only ferrite that’s NOT man-made is good ol’ magnetite (i.e., a natural magnet, sometimes given the old-fashioned name loadstone), in which case they would have had a hell of a problem maneuvering steel equipment without getting stuck to the surface; c) to the best of my knowledge, magnetite has never been found (at least in appreciable quantity) in a real iron meteorite; and d) IF by some bizarre chance their meteor contained a lot of magnetite, there’d be no way to compress it because magnetite’s crystal structure is already as compact as it gets.

Whew… sorry to turn on the full nerd mode there, but I had to let that out. Thanks for the chance to unload. :smiley:

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Armageddon is a fun, big budget Jerry Bruckheimer action fantasy movie with an ensemble cast similar to The Rock, Con Air, Independence Day, Pirates of the Carribean and Die Hard. It was written and produced to entertain with loud explosions, amusing wise cracking characters, melodramatic scenes of astronauts walking in slow motion and fighters flying in formation while American flags wave in the background to the tunes of Aerosmith.

It is not meant to be an accurate resentation of astrophysics, geology, oil drilling, NASA, the USAF, nuclear weaponry or any other aspect of the space program. It was not designed to withstand the scrutiny of a hundred thousand dorks picking apart every the minutia of every scene and gleefully sharing every continuity error and logically implausable scene on the Internet.
Besides, what kind of freakin cyborg doesn’t get all teary when Chick’s (Will Paton) ex wife tells their kid that the “salesman” he sees on TV with the astronauts is his father.

To answer some of the OPs questions:

The equipment was damaged in the rock storm

Because the crew would be killed and the movie would end

Because it’s not dramatic if a meteor hits in the great plains 100 miles from a major city.

The smaller pieces were vaporized. The point is that even if larger meteors hit, who cares because they won’t be big enough to kill the planet.

The spin started when it went past the moon. They tell you this.

The correct answer is “who gives a shit?”. It’s not relevant to the plot.

Because it’s funny.

He just does.

Because it’s funny.

They don’t. “The shuttle takes two to fly so we can either all stay here and die or ALL OF YOU can draw straws.”

The correct answer is “who gives a shit”. But if you need a better explanation, it has both and uses the ski in space so it doesn’t rip apart the tires on the sharp rocks.

I assumed they were in the Gulf of Mexico. You also forgot that AJ was also able to set up his own drilling company complete with his name on the sign. It doesn’t make sense but I don’t care.

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I don’t really mind this movie. I hated it the first time, and then the 2nd time I realized “Wait. That’s it! It’s a comedy! That’s where the enjoyment comes from”.

So I just watch it as a comedy, like a big-budget version of Airplane II. Actually, One could say that Armagedon is “Airplane III: The search for more money”.

Oh, and it gets brownie points for having a scene where Bruce Willis tries to kill Ben Affleck with a shotgun. Someone on this forum once said “Everyone movie should have a scene where Bruce Willis tries to kill Ben Affleck with a shotgun”. I’m inclined to agree.

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Really?? You don’t say! :rolleyes:

Look, as a sci-fi fan in particular, I’m perfectly happy to suspend my disbelief when a story is good. I also recognize what this movie was trying to accomplish. On the blow-everything-up, rah-rah scale of things, this movie rates a 8 or 9 out of 10.

But I’ll reserve the right to be mildly irritated with the artistic license that Hollywood likes to take on scientific subjects, because too many non-science types swallow what they see as the truth. After discovering, in rapid succession, that three people I would consider reasonably well educated, sane folks all thought that people and dinosaurs existed simultaneously because of The Flintstones, I decided to be a little more vocal about my nitpicking.

By way of contrast, Deep Impact wasn’t perfect either but they did make an effort to get more of the details on target, and for that alone it ranks higher than Armageddon in my book. YMOV.

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Personally, I can’t believe people complain about Armageddeon but give Deep Impact a pass, as the latter couples the bad science of the former with a dose of **extra-**stupid decision-making and a horribly contrived romance plot tacked on.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – Deep Impact is a movie so dumb that you end up at the final reel rooting for the rock to wipe out humanity and replace it with something smarter…

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Than I suggest you hang out with smarter people. It’s not a scientific subject any more than Peter Pan, Star Wars or The Flintstones. It’s fantasy and should be taken as such. Attempting to apply some sort of stringent scientific method to the film will only result in frustration. You either accept that Peter Pan can fly, The Force is strong in this one and some fat dude works in a quary using a dinosaur as a crane…or you don’t.
Sorry, but nitpicking movies does not make you appear intelligent or clever. It makes you appear anal and pretentious.

Yeah…but it sucked. It was boring, the characters were uninteresting and other than the big wave hitting New York, it was largely forgettable.
Personally, I think Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay are geniouses when it comes to those kinds of mindless action movies. For some reason they have a knack of making those kinds of films exciting and cool in a way that The Core and Stealth aren’t.

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The term “Unobtanium” was used by scientists and engineers to ridicule scripts like these that called for a material so strong nothing could damage it, and yet was maleable or otherwise formable into useful items. The Core decided to actually use it as their metal in the script.
Armageddon’s “science” used to satisfy the “science fiction” label was bad, but not too bad compared to other movies. The difference is quantity, in that every other minute “Science!” was included that was wrong, exaggerated, and usually unnecessary. The science that was accurate was too complicated (ie, the mission was more difficult because the asteroid was spinning on all three axis). The rest of the movie was awful, too, causing even casual lay observers to question everything about it.
I had already seen Deep Impact when I saw Armageddon, and Armageddon did not benefit from the comparison to a similar movie that, while flawed, correctly focused on people’s reactions to impending doom.

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If we’ve learned nothing else from “Armageddon”, it should be that it’s easier to teach a miner spaceflight than it is to teach an astronaut mining…
-Joe

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Oh, the folks I referred to are indeed pretty smart. They just happen to be non-science folk, which in this country, in this day and age, means there is a helluva lot that they don’t know. That’s okay, as I’m far from an expert on a lot of subjects, but I’m always happy to learn something new from them; I’ll assume, unless I see signs to the contrary, that the same holds true in reverse.

Maybe a better example, because it’s less clear-cut to the average person, is the ridiculousness that was The Day After Tomorrow.

In any case, I thought I made it pretty clear that I’m happy to “go with the flow” if the storyline is good, so I think you’re making more of this than is necessary.

I usually reserve the real nitpicky stuff for people I know will get it or appreciate it, and keep to a more general level stuff for everyone else. Since a lot of the general stuff had already been covered by other people in this thread or they links they gave, I gave in to a moment of weakness and übergeekness. So sorry.

But hey, if nitpicking makes me appear anal and pretentious, I could do worse than be in The Bad Astronomer’s company!

Bruckhemier and Bay also did Pearl Harbor, which put me to sleep. Like I said before, YMOV.

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The “intelligent big giant meteor movie” was Deep Impact.

Armageddon was just … stoopid, like “Dirty Dozen in Space.”

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It occurs to me I should clarify something - by “non-science person” in my last post, I meant people who aren’t at least science buffs.

garygnu, I agree with your perspective.

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They can leave all the plot-holes, impossibilities, and scientific errors in, and then add all the one’s from The Core, if only they’d take out the love scenes between Afflack and Tyler. God those made me want to stick spikes in my eyes.

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Armageddon goes out of its way in its opening sequence to suggest that we’re going to take a look at events which happened before and will happen again. If we’re going to do that we’re taking things out of the realm of fantasy and giving me some “what if” sci fi set here on Earth.

If we can’t find room in a bajillion dollar budget to hire a scientist and get some very basic things right, we can at least hire a continuity editor. Or have humans act like humans usually do.

If we can’t do that, we need not to be making a movie.

The more I think about the story the less sense any of it makes. Oil rig strikes oil, people almost get killed, boss gets taken away by the government, so… the entire crew takes a vacation in the States? And the boss knows this intuitively?

Yes, it was in the South China Sea. An incredibly horny dude getting off of an oil rig with a pocketful of money in Asia does not fly to New Orleans to hit on women at a bar. No, no, no. He certainly doesn’t get there on commercial flights before his boss with a military escort get to Houston.

I don’t happen to find ethnic stereotypes funny. What is this, 1906? Half of the “humor” in the movie either revolves around peoples ethnicities or Steve Buscemi’s character enjoying sex with underage girls. “Hardy har…”