You asked for it: 2026 UPDATE
I have to word this very carefully. Do you really want to mess with Harry Stamper? I mean, he shot a person with a shotgun at close range on an oil rig all because his daughter had limited options and thought Ben Affleck would be a good choice in boyfriend. Armageddon is a great movie.. but.. not so great when you’re overly science-y minded 🙁
We all know that Bruce Willis is the savior of Earth from an older article which no longer exists, that some of the movies’ plot points with real scientific answers. On my older article, I quoted that NASA shows the 1998 film Armageddon to its management training hires, and they have to pick out all of the inaccuracies in order to get hired. Whether they actually don’t get the job because they only managed to get 167 out of the 168 is a closely guarded secret. So what exactly is wrong with the film? I’m not going to list all 168 (NASA quoted amount), because I don’t want to be here all day writing this.. so here’s 15 🙂
These are in no particular order of the films’ events.
I saw this awhile ago but… 16- they say the asteroid would be like 10 000 atomic bombs going off which is an understatement of epic proportions. 17- something the size of Texas and only 18 days away would not only be visible to 2 telescopes but easily seen by anyone with eyes. 18- the asteroid is solid iron and they drill a 2 foot hole 800 feet into it in no time 19- when they train for zero gravity, they pump the air out of a hanger…because that makes gravity disappear, right? Crap..I could go on and on.
i was lost from part of shuttles tailgaiting on the way up. since wake turbulance crashes jets. fun 2 watch if your retarded?
I love all this, but did anyone who saw Armageddon think it was a documentary? We all know the most implausible bit of the film is Rockhound hooking up with Molly Mounds. Next up? Woody is not a real cowboy, shocker.
20. The movie goes out of its way to show us the crew discarding lots of equipment they found unnecessary, yet for some reason they decided to keep the gun.
21. NASA was willing to risk sending drillers into space with minimal astronaut training as opposed to sending astronauts into space with minimal drilling training.
22. I haven’t seen the opening in a while, but it shows the dinosaur extinction event… and yet, if I recall, has the continents in their present day locations? (This ironically sets the tone for the movie better than the voiceover could ever hope to)
thebeam2008 – The entire asteroid is not solid iron. The area they landed on has a plate of solid iron. That is why they start off going slow and breaking lots of bits.
Not sure what the point with number 9 was…everyone would die…that’s kind of what the movie said.
“the item the gun is attached too, the spaceship in this case, would go flying backwards at nearly the same speed as the bullet leaving the barrel”
— only if the bullets massed roughly the same as the ship. m₁δv₁ + m₂δv₂ = 0, dude…
Nice post but we _all_ see those things in the movie. How else could have they made the movie without actually doing everything? It’s obvious it was photographed in the space. I wonder for how long time have they waited for an asteroid come but they did and it is clear to see. It’s as obvious as the Sun rising in the west… 😉
Those Gatling guns are attached to the drilling rig (armadillo) so the point about F=Ma still stands. They can put out a huge amount of lead in a very short time.
I’m more confused about why they bothered to take them along in the first place. What exactly were they expecting to shoot?
Space zombies
Harry and Grace are flown to NASA in 18.5 hours, yet when Harry is gathering his crew-Bear is in South Dakota, Chick is in Vegas, Rockhound is in New Orleans, Oscar is in Texas and somehow in less than 18 hours, AJ is running his own oil site. How did they all scatter in les time than it took Harry to get to NASA? Plus, Harry was flown off my chopper. The drillers would be leaving on the crew boat, taken to the mainland, then to an airport. Even if Stamper Oil has it’s own private plane, there is still no way they could scatter in that little time.