Meanwhile, if politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, so does the distinct possibility that the world is about to end. The United States and Russia have therefore secretly built a spacecraft in orbit that is supposed to carry astronauts and cosmonauts to the approaching monster and blast it to smithereens. Capt. Spurgeon “Fish” Tanner, played by Robert Duvall, leads a team that lands on the fast-approaching comet and plants the standard weapon of choice, which is supposed to force the thing off course. But, confound it, the supernuke instead blows it into two huge pieces, both of which head straight for the Western Hemisphere.
While a last-ditch, unsuccessful effort is made to stop the two speeding impactors with nuclear missiles, the president declares martial law; two hundred thousand preselected scientists, teachers, engineers, artists, and soldiers are given special emergency protection; and a national lottery is conducted for ordinary folks to see who will be given shelter in limestone caves in Missouri and who will be reduced to their component parts or turned into steam. While individual sagas are playing out among the astronauts and their loved ones, one of the comet halves lands in the Atlantic Ocean off North Carolina, causing the mother of all tsunamis, which kills millions. But the other half of the comet is blown apart with the suddenly invaluable H-weapons by Fish Tanner and his crew after they decide to take on a suicide mission. Earth is spared yet again.
“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.)
Doomsday Rock, another television film, came out in 1997 and concerned a noted astronomer who figured out that a comet was headed this way based on an ancient civilization's time line. True to form, he is ignored by most people, but a few are convinced and, with him, take over a missile silo and use its tracking equipment to find the thing. Security at the silo, which would have been set up to stop an attack by armed Russian agents, is not up to stopping a small group of intellectual rabble.
Asteroid, yet another television nail-biter that ran the same year, had Dallas as the target and its very upset residents reacting in ways that just about covered the whole emotional spectrum. The common denominator of all of the impact flicks was humans reacting to overwhelming danger. That theme goes back to the Iliad and the Odyssey (although Odysseus would never have so much as thought of abandoning Ithaca to the Cyclops Polyphemus).
Astronomers are the sentinels, the ones in the planetary watchtower, who see possible catastrophe coming and heroically alert the world in much of the literature, in motion pictures, and on television, since they are the ones with the telescopes. And unlik
e biologists, who create strains of deadly viruses in laboratories or find ways to kill them, and unlike physicists, who concoct terrible weapons or send people around the Solar System, astronomers’ work is passive. They spend their time peering at the universe through telescopes, which is about as exciting—to those who do not understand the excitement of discovering new worlds or increasing our knowledge of ones that have already been discovered—as crocheting. That makes them the ideal people to become instant heroes—humanity's saviors—by necessarily being the first to see the potential world-ender coming.
In Moonfall, for example, science fiction writer Jack McDevitt has an amateur discover a new comet that is one hundred times the size of other comets and is traveling at ten times their speed, not toward Earth, for a change, but toward the Moon. That would be bad enough under ordinary circumstances, but it is infinitely worse because, when the discovery is made, no less a dignitary than the vice president of the United States is on the lunar surface about to inaugurate a just-completed moon base. Having been alerted, scientists study the situation and conclude that, in less than five days, the comet will crash into the Moon, shattering it into large fragments that will rain down on Earth, causing killer storms and other calamities. Hence the book's title: moonfall, as in rainfall and snowfall. The comet is finally nudged off course with barely hours to spare by intrepid spacemen and spacewomen.
If there were an award for the most bizarre and improbable end-of-Earth story, a two-part television series called Impact, which aired in Canada and in the United States in 2009, would be top contender. During the worst meteor shower in ten thousand years, a “rogue” asteroid hidden in the meteors hits the Moon with such force that it and part of the Moon are shot to Earth, where they penetrate the atmosphere and impact. Damage is relatively slight, so there is relief, but that turns out to be unwarranted because there are subtle effects, such as cellphone disruptions, odd tidal waves, and static discharges. The usual suspects—the world's leading scientists—soon conclude that the Moon itself has been changed because the asteroid that hit it was actually a brown dwarf, which is a failed star. That is, it is an object that does not have enough hydrogen mass to be a star but still manages to be something tangible. The dwarf embeds itself in the Moon with such force that the Moon is pushed out of its orbit and heads straight toward…(begins with an E…). The defensive unit has just thirty-nine days to get the fast-approaching monster satellite to change direction, or there will be a big splat (as Dana Mackenzie put it in his book of that name, which is about the Moon being created when an object larger than Mars hit the home planet in its formative stage with such force that it knocked off a chunk that went into permanent orbit). After an attempt to destroy the Moon with nuclear weapons fails, two of the scientists, an astronaut, and the de rigueur cosmonaut land on it, plant an electromagnetic Moon-busting device, and set it to go off after they leave. Two of them make it back to Earth, the Moon is blown in half yet again—thus saving Earth—and the cursed brown dwarf flies into the Sun, which is exactly what it deserves. The scientific community (which was overdosed on close-call fluff by that point), for the most part, ignored Impact, which is to say it had precious little impact on the people who really known about such things.
Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) Page 11
