Cinema Peer Review: Armageddon

Michael Bay shows equal contempt for the laws of physics and the laws of storytelling in Armageddon. This 1998 overcooked disaster movie is so stuffed with physical impossibilities that NASA experts voted it one of the most scientifically flawed films ever made (though the top dishonor went to the 2009 disaster film 2012).

Armageddon does inadvertently teach you some things when you try to separate the elements of the film that are sort of improbable from the ones that are flat-out impossible. For instance, there’s one scene where Ben Affleck uses a Gatling gun mounted on a rover to shoot his way out of a crashed space shuttle. While ridiculous, this kind of gunplay in space isn’t totally implausible. Though you might think that the lack of oxygen in space means that you can’t generate the spark needed to shoot a gun, modern ammunition actually removes this requirement by incorporating its own chemical oxidizer (potassium perchlorate is one common ingredient).

But other than the ability to fire guns in space and the fact that asteroids, space shuttles, and nuclear bombs exist, Armageddon doesn’t get much else right. Let’s start with the big bad threat: the Texas-size “global killer” asteroid “Dottie” that Bruce Willis and company have to dispatch.

Texas is 773 miles across at its widest point; the largest asteroid (by diameter) we’ve found in the solar system thus far is Ceres, 590 miles across. Asteroids don’t just pop into being in the asteroid belt, and we managed to discover Ceres by 1801, so it stands to reason that we probably should have spotted Dottie long before she started heading towards us.

According to the film, Dottie was hiding out in the asteroid belt until it was knocked towards Earth by a comet. Given what we know about the characteristics of the fictional asteroid, the numbers don’t add up.

“Even if we assume the size is an exaggeration,” astronomer and writer Phil Plait wrote in his review of the film, “a comet could not simply impact it and knock it out of orbit! An asteroid with a radius of, let’s say, 500 kilometers and made of iron (as was said many times in the movie) would mass about 5 x 1024 grams, or five million million million tons. That’s a lot of asteroid; you could ram it with comets for years and not move it much.”

The solution NASA comes up with to save humanity is to drill 800 feet down into Dottie’s surface and set off a nuclear bomb, thereby splitting the asteroid into two pieces that will sail off safely by Earth, four hours before it strikes the planet (63,000 miles from impact). Could this plan actually work in real life?

Some University of Leicester physics students ran the numbers, and the short answer is no. In their calculations, published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics, the students figured that based on the film’s description of Dottie, the bomb would have to produce 8 x 10²⁶ joules of energy to push the asteroid far enough away from Earth before it closed that 63,000 mile gap. Bad news for humanity, though; the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Soviet Union’s 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, had a maximum yield of just 4.18 x 10¹⁷ joules. Such a blast falls short of the necessary energy by about nine orders of magnitude.

In fact, in order for the bomb plan to work, the University of Leicester team calculated that Bruce Willis and crew would have had to have set off the bomb at a distance of about 88 astronomical units (Earth-Sun distances) away from Earth, which would put them on the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt, a realm of small space objects out past Neptune.

The head-scratching details come thick and fast. The two space shuttles ferrying our heroes to the asteroid stop en route to refuel at a Russian space station, which starts spinning in order to generate gravity. But the station starts rotating before the shuttles dock—a needless complication, meaning that both shuttlecraft now have to fly round and round to keep pace with the station. Also, this spin-generated gravity appears “normal” inside the station, but in reality the force would be directed out away from the center—meaning the astronauts would be pushed back into their shuttles.

These are just some of the more obvious problems. There’s lots of other details that don’t hash out. In the movie, the space shuttles are shown banking and turning in space like fighter jets, which these craft simply don’t do; space shuttles were fueled by liquid hydrogen, not liquid oxygen (which NASA does use, but as an oxidizer), as the movie has it; and there are numerous instances of fire burning in the airless environment of outer space.

Trying to keep track of the physical impossibilities is a job in and of itself. We’ll have to leave critiquing the narrative flaws of Armageddon to other film reviewers. Roger Ebert called the film “an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained”—and you can add “the laws of physical reality” to the list as well.

Rating: 1 out of 5 Bruce Willises (Bruce Willi?)