1998 Sci-Fi Disaster Movie Scene Gets Pitiful Accuracy Grade (Despite Being A “10 For Excitement”)

The disaster movie has been a staple of the entertainment landscape for decades. As with any genre, there are a number of entries that stand above the rest, offering up extreme thrills and often pushing boundaries visually. The 1990s, in particular, was a big decade for the disaster genre, with movies chronicling all manner of natural disasters and planetary threats.

When it comes to natural disasters, titles like Twister (1996), Dante’s Peak (1997), and Volcano (1997) featured impressive effects as nature wreaks havoc on various communities. When the disaster movie genre is mixed with sci-fi, the stakes are often raised even higher, and humankind itself can face extinction. Independence Day (1996) was a seminal entry in this respect, leaning particularly hard into sci-fi, but Deep Impact (1998), which features a comet on a collision course with Earth, offered up similar thrills without an alien threat. Another 1998 film took this same approach and was an even bigger hit.

Armageddon’s Accuracy Fails To Impress A Former Astronaut

But The Michael Bay Disaster Movie Succeeds On One Front

A former NASA astronaut analyzes scenes from Armageddon, awarding the sci-fi disaster flick a pitiful accuracy grade. Directed by Michael Bay, the 1998 film remains a seminal entry in the genre, following a team of deep-core drillers as they embark on a mission to prevent a massive asteroid from wiping out all life on Earth. The film, which features an impressive cast that includes Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Owen Wilson, and Liv Tyler, was a major success at the box office and features a number of bombastic, Bay-style action sequences.

In a new video for Insider, former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott analyzes select scenes from Armageddon for their realism, and, unsurprisingly, the film gets a lot wrong. Though she admits that one scene in which a space shuttle’s windows shatter does feature accurate elements, as this is a very real threat that astronauts face, the movie is generally filled with unrealistic “Hollywood” elements, such as characters not wearing their helmets. Check out Stott’s analysis below and her abysmal grade for the film out of 10:

“There are a lot of layers just to maintain the pressure and the structural integrity of the windows on a spaceship, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be damaged in space. We used to inspect them, like microscopically inspect them, and even little tiny dings from dust in space could cause an imperfection in the window. They’re encountering big pieces of asteroid that are coming at them in the opposite direction. They’ve got a lot of energy coming into it. I think there’s every reason to believe that the windows could shatter.

“As an astronaut, it’s frustrating to watch these kinds of scenes. It’s kind of the Hollywood part of it where you want to see the actor’s face so they don’t have their helmets on, and then, somehow at the end, they try to recover by getting their helmet on at the last minute. You absolutely would’ve had a helmet on from the beginning.

“Guess
I’d have to give this clip in Armageddon a two
[out of 10]. I’d rate this clip 10 for excitement in the way that it all went down.”

Armageddon
has only a 43% score on
Rotten Tomatoes
but was a box office hit, grossing $553.7 million worldwide.

Our Take On Armageddon’s Lack Of Realism

Bay’s Sci-Fi Disaster Movie Doesn’t Have To Be Accurate

Armageddon featuring scientific inaccuracies isn’t surprising, and it’s also not necessarily a bad thing. Bay has a recognizable filmmaking style that generally prioritizes style over substance, and this is why so many of his films end up being quite entertaining, though not particularly thoughtful.

Armageddon remains one of Bay’s best movies, even if it does feature head-scratching elements like deep-core drillers being trained as astronauts instead of the other way around. As Stott says, Armageddon may not feature much in the way of accuracy, but it does certainly deliver on excitement, and that’s the main thing.

Source: Insider