If the patriarchy ever invited the fellas over for a movie night, I’d recommend director Michael Bay’s 1998 disaster epic Armageddon. It’s a classic of macho mythology and one of the last movies to unironically celebrate old-fashioned manly virtues like “horny” and “mad.”
Armageddon is about a ragtag group of filthy American oil riggers who ride a space shuttle to the surface of a giant killer asteroid and then proceed to blow it the fuck up, saving the world from total obliteration.
I don’t want to assume everyone has seen this big-budget Valentine to toxic masculinity. It’s currently on Hulu. But, once upon a time, I was young, and I almost (almost!) cried in the theater at the end of Armaggedon when [OBLIGATORY SPOILER ALERT] legendary roughneck Harry Stamper sacrificed his life for all humanity. What a guy.
Bruce Willis is Harry at his most Bruce Willis, bald, squinty, and smirky.
But before doing what he has to do, Harry says goodbye to his daughter Grace, played by Liv Tyler, who is back on Earth. Sad stuff. Then he tells her fiancé — who is also his protege — AJ, a young fratty Ben Affleck, that he loves him, even though, at the beginning of the movie, Harry tried to murder A.J. with a shotgun for sleeping with Grace, a grown woman who runs Harry’s oil rig business. This is all forgotten, though. You see, A.J. drew the suicide mission short straw, but Harry wouldn’t allow that to happen. He takes the kid’s place, and as he walks away, A.J. tells him he loves him too.
At the time, I’m sure I thought something like, “That’s the way to go.” I would have never openly admitted that Harry’s sacrifice made me emotional. I would have shrugged off the suggestion. Tears? No. That’s sweat. Face sweat from clenching my fists. But the truth is, I loved my dude friends, and I would totally trigger a nuke to save them.
Armaggedon was written to force men to feel emotions and, in the late 90s, it sort of worked. It was on a mission to make men sniffle and contemplate under what circumstances they would open up and tell their loved ones their inner-most feelings.
Michael Bay combined The Right Stuff with The Magnificent Seven and peak MTV to produce a loud, rowdy, sentimental rock-and-roll blockbuster with plenty of shots of tough guys in flight suits slow-motion walking down runways and into warehouses and then, later, a bunch of these righteous dudes heroically die in space. *Salutes*
This is the kind of movie where the smartest guys in the room are a band of foul-mouthed, blue-collar brothers, and the room I’m talking about is already full of literal rocket scientists from NASA. It’s two and a half hours of sweat, grease, and phallic images: spurting oil pumps, spinning drills, thrusting space shuttles.
It’s also a very “boys only” movie. Tyler is a naturally intelligent actor but she can’t do much with Grace, who isn’t even really a three-dimensional human being, just daddy’s little girl, but also hot.
The only other memorable female characters are an astronaut who gets pushed out of the way during the climax so a gruff man can bang a sputtering engine with a wrench and a nurse who is supposed to give anal probes to the fellas during a “training to be an astronaut” montage sequence. Ha, ha, butts!
Those ladies aside, this is a locker room movie where jocks and nerds shake hands. Billy Bob Thorton plays NASA’s egghead-in-chief, and he is there for two reasons: quasi-scientific exposition and to look longingly at Harry, the only man for the job, goddammit. The best parts in the movie are when Willis’ plain-spoken All-American character has to explain things to all the dumb-dumb PhDs that work for the U.S. government.
This movie was made during an era when the U.S. space program had seen better days but was still run by some of the most brilliant people on the planet. That’s still the case, but now there’s also an entire commercial space program run by socially awkward billionaires.
The movie unfolds to multiple songs from Aerosmith, including their biggest hit, the ballad ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing.” It still surprises me that a minor league 70s rock band like Aerosmith transformed itself into the world's biggest music act in the 90s.
Their lead singer, Steven Tyler, the father of Liv, looks like an enchanted scarecrow, but he sold Aerosmith’s sports bar headbangers with a voice only a banshee could love. Their music burned on the way down like bottom-of-the-barrel booze, which was probably their charm.
The cast includes absolute dude geniuses like the late Michael Clarke Duncan, a gentle giant with a booming voice, and William Patton as a noble, good old boy who wants to get back with his ex-wife and son. Every time I rewatch Armaggedon I remember that it stars a fresh-faced Owen Wilson and Steve Buscemi, whose character is always worried he will get arrested for breaking the age of consent laws. Is that creepy? Yes! Was this movie made in the late 90s? Yes!
Armaggedon is one of the last of its kind, an action-packed testosterone-fueled Hollywood reverie dreamed up in a room full of straight white men eating garbage sandwiches, telling gross jokes, and farting. It was anti-feminist and pro-knuckledragger, an antidote to Bill Clinton, a sensitive Ivy League overachiever (who was also a scumbag.)
Back then, Armaggedon didn’t have to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings or suffering any consequences. It was a brain-dead spectacle with no regard for science or physics or reality that explored one primary theme: “men are awesome!” (I suppose there’s a secondary theme, too, which is “man vs. space.”) Armaggedon was a sincere celebration of traditional masculinity, which is just a social code that dictates how one group of people should behave, and in this case, the group I’m writing about controls most of the wealth on Earth. (Men. Sup.)
For instance: traditional masculinity says men are strong. That is our value. We are strong because men fight bears or some armchair anthropological bullshit like that. And strong people never show weakness. They never cry, for instance. I mean, how can you fight a bear if your eyes are stinging with tears? Got it? The only time that modern men are allowed to express emotions together is when they’re drunk or when a sports team is winning or losing.
I suppose they can cry before their girlfriends or wives, but not too much. These are not hard-and-fast rules, but embracing stereotypes is easier than confronting actual emotions. That takes courage. I want to point out that when it comes to traditional feminity, women are raised to think of themselves as innocent daughter dolls and sexy whore queens and walking baby factories and also husband therapists. Men have fewer roles: bear fighter, moneymaker, porn star and, you know, asteroid destroyer. Gender roles are a drag, whether you’re raised to believe that men are kings of the house or that feelings are supposed to be locked away in the basement of your soul.
In Armaggedon, men can express emotions, but only because they’re on a Space Shuttle, hurtling towards an asteroid the size of Texas. If it hits the Earth, everyone dies. So it’s a lot of pressure. In that situation, it is alright to care. And you’re also allowed to say “I love you” to another straight white man, but only if he’s about to kill himself for the good of humanity. I love you too, Harry.
Look, this is a fun re-watch from another time, long ago. There is a note of sadness throughout the movie as if the filmmakers knew that something was ending, a time when men could get away with anything, unlike today, when men can still get away with anything, but it’s a little bit harder. At the film's core, though, is a timeless message: older generations are supposed to make sacrifices for younger generations. But that’s a message no one wants to hear these days, especially the older generations.
In 1998, Harry Stamper gave his life for humanity. In 2024, Harry Stamper would be glued to a recliner posting vulgar pro-Trump, AI-generated memes to Facebook.