Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (12 page)

“Apparently there is no better aid to family therapy than a murderously large meteor hurtling toward Earth,”
New York Times
film critic Janet Maslin wrote in her appraisal of the film.

So the costly comet thriller
Deep Impact
, which is to summer movies what the first crocus is to springtime, explores the salutary effects of imminent doom. Lovers bond, family ties bind and old wounds heal as the planet prepares for its final hours, although the crisis proves not as dire as it could have been. We will survive to be hit by another comet picture (
Armageddon
) in July.

Deep Impact
will doubtless seem the more sensitive of the two, since it emphasizes feelings over firepower whenever possible. Mimi Leder, who directed
The Peacemaker
and gives greater gloss and personality to this film, directs with a distinct womanly touch. Within the end-of-the-world action genre, it's rare to find attention paid to rescuing art, antiques, elephants and flamingos.
²⁶

The villain in
Armageddon
is a “rogue” comet that, while passing through the asteroid belt, pushes an asteroid the size of Texas and other large rocks toward Earth. NASA becomes aware of the impending bombardment when a massive meteor shower clobbers the East Coast, including New York, and Finland and Shanghai. Of relatively little consequence, one of the comet pieces turns the orbiting shuttle
Atlantis
into a cloud of metal fragments. The astronomers yet again sound a timely
warning by declaring that the Lone Star asteroid is due to hit Earth in eighteen days.

Given the damage that would be caused by a relatively puny kilometer-size asteroid, one the size of Texas would, at minimum, cause another extinction event like the one that started the long night and therefore did in
Tyrannosaurus rex
, its cold-blooded relatives, and the vegetation they lived on. At worst, it would disintegrate the planet, or dematerialize it, as NASA's scientists might put it. They hurriedly came up with a plan to blow the rock in two with a nuke so that both halves would separate and safely pass Earth. Then, however, a chunk of the comet that could be the size of Houston or Fort Worth (to push the metaphor to its limit) pulverizes Paris. Two shuttle orbiters,
Freedom
and
Independence
, are assigned to land on the next approaching asteroid, plant a remotely controlled nuclear bomb on it, and leave. But
Independence's
hull is punctured by one of the cometary fragments as it approaches the asteroid and it crashes, leaving
Freedom
to make a safe landing on it so the bomb can be planted.

The asteroid heats up as it gets closer to Earth, though, and that causes a rock storm that damages the bomb's trigger so that it cannot be set off remotely. Then, with Earth hanging in the proverbial balance, a command decision is made. One person is going to have to land on the asteroid and manually detonate the nuke, meaning that he will commit suicide to save the whole planet and all of humanity.

That man is Harry S. Stamper, the world's best deep-sea oil driller (and, thus, an explosives expert) played by Bruce Willis, who is left on the asteroid by
Freedom
and proceeds to do his immortal duty by manually setting off the buried “device” and martyring himself.
Armageddon
fared better at the box office than it did with reviewers, another indication that the public remains acutely interested in its fragile home's survival in a hostile and dangerous environment. It brought in $554,600,000
with a production cost of $140,000,000, making it the highest grossing film worldwide in 1998. And it was nominated for four Oscars, all of them for technical achievement such as best visual effects and best song.

It should be noted that nominations, as opposed to awards, do not count for much. Any work, however lacking in substance or creativity, can be nominated for an award, including Nobels, Pulitzers, and other prestigious prizes. It is winning that counts, and
Armageddon
had the ignominious distinction of winning a Golden Raspberry Award (also known as the “Razzies”) for worst actor, Bruce Willis.

Maslin skewered it. Here she is, winding up for the pitch:

Doom threatens. Again. This time it's a giant asteroid. (“It's the size of Texas, Mr. President”), and it's the Chrysler Building that becomes New York's most conspicuously flattened landmark (just as
Deep Impact
toppled the Statue of Liberty and
Godzilla
wrecked the Brooklyn Bridge.) That damage is done by a fake meteor shower during the first part of
Armageddon
. The sight, however apocalyptic, isn't as scary as the prospect of raising a generation of Americans on movies like this. Movie isn't actually the best word to describe
Armageddon
. More accurately it's a product, a feat of salesmanship, a sight worth noticing only because, like the asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth, its size and inevitability aren't easy to miss. But it should surprise no one to learn that the catchy title and prime opening date were more vital to the genesis of
Armageddon
than the burning need to tell one more derivative disaster story…. Though it means to be inspiring, it has quite the opposite effect. There's not a believable moment here (unless you count some boyish carousing in a strip club). The actors mark time, and the gung-ho heroics on display are embarrassingly hollow…. A real movie about courage in space is
Apollo 13
, in which fear and sacrifice have meaning. This jingoistic, overblown spectacle is about whistling in the dark.
²⁷

Michael O'Sullivan reviewed the film for the
Washington Post
:

Like a white-water ride on Class V rapid,
Armageddon
is a loud, long and bumpy experience. It might make you tense, it might make you nauseous, and its clangorous roar could well give you a migraine headache. Then again, when it's all over you might just want to throw up in a bucket, buy another ticket and get back in the boat for a second adrenaline-stoked slide down that swollen stream. Allow a day for recovery, however, because the nearly three-hour film is emotionally and physically exhausting. It's an intensely visceral pleasure, not unmixed with pain, like the multiple g-force acceleration experienced by an astronaut during lift-off.
Armageddon
peels your eyelids back and blows your eardrums out until rational analysis is moot…. But the special effects are stupendous and the suspense is palpable. By the film's end…you may resent the fact that every imaginable button of yours has been pushed raw, but you will be powerless to lift a finger to stop it.
²⁸

“Bruce Willis saves the world,” Todd McCarthy opined in
Variety
, “but can't save
Armageddon
. The second and, mercifully, last of the season's nuke-the-asteroid-or-bust pre-millennium spectaculars is so effects-obsessed and dramatically be-numbed as to make
Deep Impact
look like a humanistic masterpiece. Despite its frequently incoherent staging and an editing style that amounts to a two and a half-hour sensory pummeling, $150 million sci-fi actioner nonetheless the Willis juice, Jerry Bruckheimer–Michael Bay bad-boy ingredients and Disney marketing muscle going for it to launch it into high commercial orbit.”
²⁹
(Bruckheimer, Hurd, and Bay were its producers.)

Jeanine Basinger, a film scholar, thought otherwise and called the film a “work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion. The film makes these ordinary men noble, lifting their efforts up into an epic event. If that isn't screenwriting, I don't know what is.”
³⁰
It was a complement not only for Bay but for herself, since she was his teacher at Wesleyan University.

Armageddon
did not win plaudits for scientific accuracy, either. Bay admitted in an interview with
Entertainment Weekly
that the film's central premise—that the space agency could blow a large, Earth-approaching asteroid in half—was unrealistic. NASA, which was quietly trying to convince Congress and the Clinton administration that planetary defense should be one of its major programs, provided technical assistance to Disney Studios, but it was careful to explain that cooperation with
Armageddon
's makers in no way indicated that it believed the movie's premise was scientifically plausible. Leaving nothing to chance, the space agency had a disclaimer inserted near the end of the credits stating, “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's cooperation and assistance does not reflect an endorsement of the contents of the film or the treatment of the characters depicted therein.”
³¹
And for good measure, it awarded the film a left-handed compliment by showing it as part of a management training program in which prospective managers were asked to find as many inaccuracies in the movie as they could. The total came to 168.
³²
Bay reacted to the scorn by apologizing for making
Armageddon
in only sixteen weeks, which, he indicated, did not give it as much time as it deserved.

The international physics community apparently thought that the film was worth no time at all. The physicists said that production time was not its problem. An article called “Could Bruce Willis Save the World?” in the
Journal of Physics Special Topics
, written by four members of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester, was among several that took strong exception to the concept of nuking the colossal attacker to save Earth. In order for the plan to work, the authors maintained, a hydrogen bomb that is a billion times more powerful than the Soviet Union's “Big Ivan,” the most powerful bomb ever detonated, would be required. Like the rest of the science community and almost everyone else, they suggested changing its course long before impact time. And they could not resist pointing out that poor Stamper was caught between a rock and a…nuclear weapon.
³³

But the negative reviews notwithstanding, the public continued to find films about objects that are too near Earth thrilling. That subject was guaranteed to fill theaters and attract television viewers who were not interested in international relations, particularly since peace had broken out between their country and a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that had imploded and morphed into just plain Russia, with the likes of Mikhail S. Gorbachev proclaiming the start of perestroika and glasnost, a restructuring of the nation and openness, respectively. He was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Cold War. A new threat was therefore in order, and if the Russians and Chinese would not provide it, the universe would. It was only natural.

Meteor
was released in 1979, during the Cold War, and was an early example of how the threat to everyone could force even enemies to cooperate. It starred Sean Connery, playing Dr. Paul Bradley (not 007, for a change), an American scientist who has invented a secret orbiting-missile platform called Hercules to use against asteroids. Unfortunately, it has been turned into an orbiting superweapon for use against the Russians by expedient bureaucrats who are forever focused on relatively petty East–West military competition. The Russians have their own missile-carrying satellite that is named Peter the Great. But then an asteroid called Orpheus collides with a comet. (Whoever named the asteroid had a wry sense of humor, since Orpheus was the god of music, poetry, and philosophy in Greek myth, and was therefore no Kali. It was like naming a serial killer Howdy Doody.) A five-mile chunk of Orpheus, along with smaller fragments, breaks off and heads for Earth. The fragments arrive here first and cause terrible devastation, including to New York, which is mostly destroyed. (It turns out that the subway is a good place to hide, though.)

Bradley and his Russian counterpart, Alexei Dubov, meet to come up with a way to stop Orpheus, but the Russian denies
that his country has its own missile platform in space. That changes after the first fragments have slammed into Earth, and both nations decide to cooperate or risk a collective outcome that the Communists definitely do not want. They fire three salvos of missiles at Orpheus, which finally explodes. That is more than can be said of the film, which was rated a dud by most of its cast and the reviewers, though it did have a cult following and influenced
Deep Impact
and
Armageddon
, both of which did considerably better in ticket sales and reviews. It also had an afterlife of sorts as yet another TV miniseries.

Meteor Apocalypse
, which was released in 2009, was made by a company called The Asylum—it means refuge as well as an institution for the mentally unbalanced—and was about the world's nuclear nations getting together to fire their missiles at a comet that is heading across Earth's path. They succeed in hitting the thing, but pieces of it reach Earth (again), not only contaminating groundwater and sickening millions of people but also obliterating Los Angeles. Destroying that city showed a clear lack of civic loyalty since it is The Asylum's asylum. Then again, it was LA's turn, New York having taken its hit in
Meteor
.

A Fire in the Sky
, which came out in 1978, was one of the first comet films made for television, and the villain's target was a relatively modest one compared to much of what followed: Phoenix, Arizona. Astronomers warned that the comet was bearing down on the hapless city, but no one believed them. That may have been at least part of the reason why graduate students in the University of Arizona's respected Department of Astronomy called the film “The Comet That Ate Phoenix.”

Meteorites!
, which made it to television twenty years later—not uncoincidentally at the time
Armageddon
and
Deep Impact
were released—was about a salvo of meteorites heading for Earth, and especially for Roswell, New Mexico. But the local officials ignore a warning because they don't want anything to
interfere with the annual UFO festival, which is celebrated to commemorate what is alleged to have been a landing there by space aliens in July 1947 that left the wreckage of their spacecraft on a ranch. In reality, a US Air Force investigation found that the wreckage was from a high-altitude surveillance balloon in a top-secret project called Mogul and published that finding in
The Roswell Report: Case Closed
. Since the locals turned the crash site into a profitable tourist attraction, they were delighted that the “government” denied that it was really a UFO, since that smacked of a conspiracy—the old cover-up—which increased the place's value. There is now an International UFO Museum and Research Center, complete with a library and life-size replicas of the large-headed creepy creatures. (And yes, one of them is green.)