Trailer
Plot summary
A meteor shower destroys an orbiting space shuttle and batters New York City. NASA traces the debris to an asteroid the size of Texas on a course to strike Earth in 18 days, killing everyone. The agency's answer is to drill a shaft into the rock, plant a nuclear bomb and split the asteroid so that each half passes by the planet. Dan Truman turns to Harry Stamper, an oil driller whose family has worked the rigs for three generations. Harry agrees to take the job only if his own people come with him, among them Chick and A.J., who is involved with Harry's daughter Grace. The crew begins astronaut training under Willie Sharp.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Armageddon (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Michael Bay said the whole movie had to be done in 16 weeks: "That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us." His visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown.
- Postgraduate students from Leicester University worked out that splitting the asteroid so both pieces cleared Earth would take 800 trillion terajoules, needing an H-bomb a billion times stronger than the Soviet "Big Ivan", whose 1961 test released only 418,000 terajoules.
- Bruce Willis was cast as part of a three-picture deal he cut with the studio to compensate it for the dissolution of 1997's Broadway Brawler, and he took a significant pay cut on the picture as part of that deal.
- In May 1998 Walt Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth added $3 million to the budget for Dream Quest Images shots of an asteroid hitting Paris, footage added two months before release purely for the television campaign, to set the film apart from Deep Impact.
- Deep Impact writer Bruce Joel Rubin said a production president at Disney took notes on everything said about his script during lunch and then initiated Armageddon as a counter film at the studio.
- Sean Connery was originally considered for the role of Stamper, but Michael Bay decided to cast a younger actor after meeting oil drillers; Bradley Cooper auditioned for A.J. Frost, which eventually went to Ben Affleck.
- By April 2002 ABC airings of Armageddon had been modified because of the September 11 attacks seven months earlier: the scene where the World Trade Center is hit by meteors and catches fire was censored for its similarity to the attacks.
- Nine writers worked on the script and only five are credited: Robert Roy Pool, Jonathan Hensleigh, Tony Gilroy, Shane Salerno and J. J. Abrams, with Paul Attanasio, Ann Biderman, Scott Rosenberg and Robert Towne also involved.
