YMMV / Armageddon (1998)

• Accidental Innuendo: Chick's line after the Armadillo's transmission blows: "I blew the tranny".
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Lev's kookiness attributable to his having spent eighteen months alone on the space station, or might he be on the autism spectrum?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Ridiculous as it may seem, one of NASA's actual real life protocols when someone "loses it" in space is to tie them down on a chair with duct tape.
• Angst? What Angst?: Apart from NASA, the rest of the world seems to have no reaction to New York City being utterly destroyed by a meteorite shower.
• Anvilicious: Lots of comments are made about how pathetic our space technology is and how utterly screwed we'd be if it happened for real. Somewhat justified in that our poor ability to detect and almost total inability deal with a potential asteroid collision is sadly very much Truth in Television (albeit, nowhere near as bad to detect as this movie depicts).
  President: Dan, we didn't see this thing coming?
  Dan Truman: Our object collision budget's a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg'n your pardon, sir, but it's a big-ass sky.
  Dan Truman: Even if the asteroid itself hits the water, it's still hitting land. It'll flash boil millions of gallons of sea water and slam into the ocean bedrock. Now if it's a Pacific Ocean impact, which we think it will be, it'll create a tidal wave 3 miles high, travel at a thousand miles an hour, covering California, and washing up in Denver. Japan's gone, Australia's wiped out. Half the world's population will be incinerated by the heat blast, and the rest will freeze to death from nuclear winter.
  Harry Stamper: And this is the best that you c - that the-The Government, the U.S. government can come up with? I mean, you-you're NASA for cryin' out loud, you put a man on the moon, you're geniuses! You-you're the guys that think this shit up! I'm sure you got a team of men sitting around somewhere right now just thinking shit up and somebody backing them up! You're telling me you don't have a backup plan, that these eight boy scouts right here, that is the world's hope, that's what you're telling me?
  General Kimsey: We spend 250 billion dollars a year on defense. And here we are. The fate of the planet is in the hands of a bunch of retards I wouldn't trust with a potato gun!
  Rockhound: Yeah, I remember this one. It's where the, uh, the coyote sat his ass down in a slingshot then he strapped himself to an Acme rocket. Is that - is that what we're doin' here?
  Rockhound: You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder?
• Awesome Music:
  • Trevor Rabin's score may have been worth the price of admission all by itself.
  • "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith is a masterpiece mixing both sadness and warmth with their rock backed by an orchestra to hammer in the vibes.
• Critical Dissonance: Lots of people complained about the science goofs and the plot holes, and film critics were absolutely merciless and wrote scathing reviews. Despite all of this, or in some cases due to this, it was loved by audiences and became the highest-grossing film of 1998.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Lev and Rockhound both have some extremely fun and memorable dialogue.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The movie has several scenes that are uncomfortable to watch after 9/11 and the War on Terror:
    • In the first ten minutes of the film, New York is decimated by a meteorite shower. It's kind of worth mentioning that in the middle of this scene there's a cabbie that screams something with each impact: "Look at that! Whoa! We're at war! Saddam Hussein's bombing us?" Oh, the innocent irony of 1990s catastrophe films. Made even more ironic by the fact that, despite Saddam Hussein's lack of involvement in 9/11, America still ended up going back to war with him less than a decade later.
    • Speaking of 9/11, you see some of the meteor impacts leaving huge gaping holes in the original World Trade Center towers. After 9/11, those can be kinda hard to look at.
    • Not only that, but there is a shot of the meteors coming in at Lower Manhattan. One of them hits the South Tower of the World Trade Center in almost the exact location that Flight 175 struck.
    • So can the shot of screaming people plummeting directly at the camera when the Chrysler Building's top is knocked off. On 9/11, long-distance footage of WTC jumpers had aired repeatedly, until the networks heard that it was terrifying people and mercifully withdrew it.
  • The destruction of the Space Shuttles Atlantis and Independence after the Columbia disaster, to the point that still shots of the Atlantis explosion from the film are often used as fake pictures online, claiming to be pictures of Columbia. In fact, this movie was going to be shown on TV the night the disaster occurred.
  • In the beginning of the movie, Truman mentions that NASA does not have the power to detect all incoming objects. On February 15, 2013, a previously undetected asteroid 20 meters in diameter and weighing over 10,000 tonnes exploded above Russia in the largest airburst since The Tunguska Event of 1908. Furthermore, videos of the airburst looked very similar to scenes of meteors falling in this movie.
  • A NASA doctor comments on Bear's shockingly bad cholesterol levels. Not as funny after Michael Clarke Duncan died of a heart attack in 2012.
  • Harry swatting golf balls at Greenpeace protesters might've made a funny scene in 1998, but now, the ongoing threat of Global Warming and how fossil fuel exhaustion is raising Earth's temperature causing the ecosystems to deteriorate at an alarming rate pretty much proves their point.
  • The iconic Paris destruction scene becomes far harder to watch nowadays, now that the Notre Dame Cathedral itself was badly damaged in a fire on April 15, 2019 literally 21 years after this film's release, in which said destruction scene was shown from the Cathedral's POV right before it's destroyed off-screen.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Harry being so disapproving of A.J. becomes this when you know that, in the Latin American Spanish dub of the film, Harry and A.J.'s voice actors are famous for another work in which A.J.'s voice actor's character is the one who famously has none of Harry's voice actor's character's antics.
  • Max yelling "The Cubs win the World Series!" into a microphone during his psych becomes this when the Chicago Cubs win the world series 18 years after this movie premiered.
  • All the critical wailing and gnashing of teeth about how this film was going to lead to Hollywood's destruction, and since Michael Bay was first a music video director, some claimed it would turn Hollywood into MTV. In less than two decades, MTV suffered massive Network Decay, while Hollywood still makes movies.
  • After getting arrested for the brawl in the strip club, Rockhound hits the police with "You'll be working security at Toys 'R Us!" for interfering with his upcoming NASA mission. Toys 'R Us ended up folding almost exactly twenty years after the movie's release.
  • Billy Bob Thornton plays Dan Truman, the head of Mission Control at NASA who was unable to go into space due to a Career-Ending Injury and wishes he could be up there with Harry (Bruce Willis) to help take out the asteroid. Come 9 years later and it's now Willis at Mission Control and Billy Bob ascending into the heavens in The Astronaut Farmer.
  • This wouldn't be the last time Paris was targeted by a meteorite, a decade later an evil AI would attempt a similar scenario to wipe out the city and killing a group of teenage virtual heroes by using a Kill Sat to divert a meteor to strike Paris as part of a bargain. Thankfully unlike the film, Paris is actually spared destruction this time around when said evil AI destroys the meteor when one of the kids calls its bluff by risking herself being a casualty to the meteor.
  • Or Harsher in Hindsight depending on your view: The Russian cosmonaut mentions that the U.S. and Russian space stations' components are all "made in Taiwan". In 2022, during the Russo-Ukrainian War, some of the Russian army's equipment was shown to have computer components made in Taiwan.
• Narm:
  • The fact that the Armadillo drilling machines each sport not one, but two machine guns, including a chin-mounted one that AJ uses to plow his way out of the crashed shuttle. A deleted scene tries to explain the gun used by Rockhound much later to be a "Debris Eliminator Unit". Yeah...
  • The astronauts drawing straws to see who would stay behind to detonate the bomb. Even then though, the drama is played totally straight.
  • Frightening as it is, many of the asteroid's geological features simply don't make any sense. The presence of light, surprisingly brittle rock formations and what sounds like the asteroid roaring and moaning is sure to leave some people shaking their heads.
• Narm Charm: The animal crackers scene. As silly as the dialogue is, it's actually kind of sweet.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Those are people falling out of the Chrysler Building during the meteor shower in New York City. For additional squick, watch the movie frame per frame. That thing that just fell on a cab's trunk, severely deforming it? Not a piece of building.
  • The fate of the Atlantis and its crew, particularly that of the astronaut working alone on repairing a nearby satellite and is clearly uneasy doing it. He sadly never makes it back to his ship and we last see him screaming as his visor is shattered and he's left tumbling into the void of space.
  • The asteroid itself is the embodiment of this. A gargantuan, hostile mass of unforeseen proportions along with thousands of meteorites following in its wake are on an imminent collision course with Earth, plagued by unpredictable geological tremors, constant gas eruptions... As Oscar sums it up best, it is the scariest environment imaginable. The astronauts are stunned silent when they finally see this hulking monstrosity up close and personal, and the audience is every bit as horrified and in awe as they are.
  • The pilots of the Independence getting sucked into the vacuum of space, with their bodies slamming into the Freedom before tumbling into open space. Worse still, they were not sealed inside their suits but seeing how they would've had no hope of recovery, perhaps it was merciful that they didn't.
  • Every city destruction scene, New York's was by far the longest of the 3 (the iconic Chrysler Building scene was definitely the highlight), Shanghai's was downright bone-chilling despite having no landmarks to smash, as it showed kids literally screaming and crying in fear as they watched their city getting leveled and flooded by the meteor's impacts. But Paris in particular stands out the most, as it is obliterated by a single meteor that strikes with a force greater than that of a nuclear bomb that literally snaps the Eiffel Tower in half like a matchstick from the impact. Suffice to say, it is a miracle that anybody or anything survived the French Capital's destruction (though the only Paris landmark that is left standing though badly damaged was the Arc de Triomphe).
  • Truman's description of what will happen if the asteroid hits. If it lands in the Pacific, as it's projected to, it will cause a three-mile high tsunami that will wipe out Australia, Japan, and anything in the US that's west of Denver. Half the world's population will be incinerated in the heat blast, and the other half will die in the colossal nuclear winter.
    • Want to make it worse? The film was low-balling it.
• Signature Scene:
  • Harry's final goodbyes to Gracie and the subsequent destruction of the asteroid probably count as such.
  • The sight of the Chrysler Building's severed spire smashing into the streets below, taking every poor soul trapped inside with it.
  • And of course, the city of Paris being wiped out in a single strike and seeing it's aftermath, showing that the only landmark in Paris that survived was the Arc de Triomphe.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's loaded to the gills with absurd pyrotechnics, melodramatic cliches, bad jokes, and so many scientific mistakes that NASA famously uses it as a litmus test of how much Hollywood fails at accuracy, and yet there are many people who love it all the same.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character
  • Out of the drillers, Oscar is a Cowboy played by Owen Wilson, and is an interesting Ascended Fanboy and Cloudcuckoolander. He doesn't get to do a single thing of importance or note in the mission itself due to dying in the shuttle crash.
  • Freddie Noonan is the only one amongst the drillers who barely had any scenes or characterization. It's easy to forget that he was there as part of AJ's team.
  • Jennifer is the only female member of the team, and gets a hint of having an interesting personality during a training scene. However, for the rest of the movie, she's barely more than a Spear Carrier, to the frustration of many fans.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Physical implausibilities aside, THAT is one impressive asteroid.
  • The space scenes in particular as well as the meteors themselves are also worthy of note.

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