Essay: 'Armageddon' made a grown man cry
Don't get me started on Aerosmith's 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing'
I have cried—really blubbered—during three movies¹: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Big Fish, and director Michael Bay's 1998 disaster epic Armageddon, 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 all-American machismo. It’s currently streaming on MGM+. But, once upon a time, I was young, and I got choked up at the end of Armageddon 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, smirky. Relaxed and sexy. Let it be written that in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and ninety-eight, the American empire’s paragon of masculinity was a mildly sarcastic, extremely capable dad who could play the harmonica. A true blue-collar mensch.
And he knew when to say “I love you.”
The movie builds to a climactic gut punch: Harry has only a few moments to say goodbye to his daughter, Grace, played by Liv Tyler, over a giant mission control screen on Earth. He’s busy riding a planet-destroying space rock stuffed with good ol’ American nukes. Harry is staying behind while everyone else rockets home.
His monologue to Grace is tough and tender. He loves his dudes, including Ben Affleck’s fratty A.J., Harry’s protégé, and the love of his daughter’s life. Harry and A.J. have a complicated history. Armageddon begins with a wild scene where Harry chases A.J. around an oil rig with a shotgun for sleeping with Grace. Water under the bridge, kid. This isn’t a long speech, because real men don’t babble. Harry tells Grace he loves her, a tear rolling down his cheek, and then, BOOM.
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. Eyeball sweat. But the truth is, I also love my dude friends, and I would totally risk it all to save them.
Armageddon was written to evoke emotions in men, and in the late 90s, it somewhat succeeded. It was on a mission to make men sniffle and contemplate the circumstances under which they would allow themselves to be vulnerable with their loved ones and share their innermost feelings.
Michael Bay combined The Right Stuff with The Magnificent Seven and peak MTV, at its most frenetic and chaotic, 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.
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 aside 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 Thornton 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. This is still the case, but there are also entire commercial aerospace companies, including one run by an emotionally volatile billionaire. (Harry Stamper would not abide that guy.)
The movie unfolds to multiple songs from Aerosmith, including their biggest hit, the ballad ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing.” What a karaoke song. 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 redneck who wants to get back together with his ex-wife and son. Every time I rewatch Armageddon, I remember that it stars a fresh-faced Owen Wilson and Steve Buscemi, whose character is always worried he will be arrested for violating the age-of-consent laws. Is that creepy? Yes! Was this movie made in the late 90s? Yes!
Armageddon 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, shortly thereafter, turned out to be a creep too.)
Back then, Armageddon 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.”) Armageddon 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.
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? 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 in front of their girlfriends or wives, but not too much. That's allowed, even though girlfriends, wives, sisters, and mothers are poor substitutes for therapists, sponsors, or friends. These are not hard-and-fast rules, but embracing stereotypes is easier than confronting actual emotions. That takes courage. Men have a few acceptable roles: aforementioned bear fighters, aggressive moneymakers, and dudes who pound beers alone in their garage. But the one constant across these make-believe gender norms is that men are supposed to be human cinderblocks. Cold. Unfeeling. Occasionally useful. We're not supposed to admit to ourselves, or each other, that childhood pains linger, or that broken dreams don't always heal, or that, sometimes, the love we have inside is too intense to bear.
In Armageddon, men can show their feelings, 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 all right to care. And you’re also allowed to say “I love you” to another straight 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 rewatch from 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 2026, Harry Stamper would be glued to a recliner, in a messy den, posting vulgar, AI-generated political memes to Facebook.
¹In the interest of transparency, I should mention that animated movies punch me right in the gut for some reason, and I have silently sobbed while sitting through the following full-length cartoons: Dumbo, Transformers: The Movie, Grave of the Fireflies, The Iron Giant, Toy Story 3, and Coco.
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