Patron's Pick: Armageddon (1998)

Patron Dan has invited us to join him in revisiting a defining entry into the micro-niche of the late 90s sci-fi action blockbuster. Michael Bay's blue collar space epic landed on 1 July 1998, made $553.7 million worldwide on a $140 million budget, and finished the year as the highest grossing film in the world. It also sits at 38% on Rotten Tomatoes and made Roger Ebert's most hated list. So it's not exactly a hidden gem, and it's certainly no critical darling. Is it time to reconsider it? Probably not. We do anyway.

The biggest film of 1998 that nobody will defend

Armageddon arrived two and a half months after Deep Impact, which astronomers agreed was the more scientifically accurate of the pair, and comfortably beat it anyway. We get into why that happened, what Bay and Bruckheimer understood about summer 1998 that everyone else didn't, and whether the furious cutting that critics hated at the time reads differently now.

Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and a cast list that will not stop

Willis, Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Owen Wilson, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, William Fichtner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Keith David. Genuinely one of the deepest benches of the decade, doing a film about drillers going to space. We talk about what the ensemble is actually doing here and why the emotional stuff lands more often than it has any right to.

It's in the Criterion Collection. Discuss.

The bit that still makes people short circuit. Criterion put out a DVD edition, complete with an essay from film scholar Jeanine Basinger arguing for Bay as a genuine master of movement, light and chaos. We take that argument seriously, or at least seriously enough, and work out whether the science being nonsense is a problem or the entire point.

Make sure you listen. You won't want to miss a thing.

About Patron's Pick

Patron's Pick is our regular strand where our Patreon supporters choose the film and we cover it, whether we like it or not. If you want a say in what we watch next, join us on Patreon.

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