Armageddon

Michael Bay starts the disaster machine late. The first third goes almost entirely to the drilling crew as a comic ensemble: the joke that these men are not astronauts, the training, the gags. Even after the asteroid threat is established the film is in no hurry to launch, so wanting it to start immediately means a long wait. The second warning concerns cutting. Shots run under a second, and on the asteroid surface it is hard to tell which vehicle or crew member you are watching. The effect is speed; orientation is what is traded away. Bay later said he would redo the third act, limiting the criticism to the editing. Nine writers worked on it and five were credited; Robert Towne and Scott Rosenberg contributed uncredited. On the commentary track Ben Affleck describes asking why training oil drillers as astronauts beat training astronauts to drill, and being told to drop it. The best detail sits in the credits, where the space agency printed a disclaimer that its cooperation did not endorse the film. On a 140 million dollar budget it topped 1998 worldwide, arriving the same summer as Deep Impact. Good if you want the long crew set up and a finish decided by a father, not physics. Not for a viewer who needs distance and direction legible.