What’s a “good-bad” movie? It’s the kind of flick that might have you cackling, hollering or groaning, one that is not necessarily great cinema but is great fun. It’s highly watchable even though — or maybe because — it’s memorably ridiculous. And it always has at least one element that pushes it into absurd territory.
“I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the [expletive] up, so that was the end of that talk,” Ben Affleck famously said about the director Michael Bay in the outrageous DVD commentary for the 1998 space disaster “Armageddon.”
He starred in the movie, the highest-grossing in the world that year, as A.J., one of said oil drillers (the hunky arrogant one with a heart of gold, to be specific) among a misfit crew of roughnecks sent to space by NASA to destroy a Texas-size asteroid on course to explode Earth in mere days.
Just about every person who’s watched this movie probably had the same question that Affleck asked Bay, but “Armageddon” is not at all concerned with the pesky constraints of science and logic. Instead, it’s proud to be overloaded with wildly implausible facts, figures, graphics, maps and missions.
In fact, it is modern lore that NASA has used the movie as part of its training program, supposedly asking trainees to spot as many errors as possible. The biggies: the vacuum in space does not apply when up against Bay’s penchant for earsplitting sound effects; the asteroid’s Earthlike gravity allows the crew to simply stroll across it; sending up two shuttles side by side would be clearly catastrophic.
