After getting his start in music videos and commercials, Michael Bay burst onto the scene as a director with Bad Boys, a 1995 action movie starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. From there, he directed The Rock (1996), which featured even more star power with Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. Since these two seminal films, Bay has become one of Hollywood’s most well-known directors, making movies that often feature an abundance of action in a unique bombastic style that has been affectionately dubbed “Bayhem.”

In 2007, Bay directed Transformers, a franchise-starter that would come to define the next decade of his career. He’s now directed five Transformers movies in total and has remained on board the franchise as a producer as he has released new movies like 6 Underground (2019) and Ambulance (2022). As sets his sights on a new movie called Robopocalypse, Bay is sure to remain beloved known for some of his earlier works, which includes a 1998 disaster movie that grossed $553 million worldwide at the box office.

Armageddon Earns A Lackluster Realism Score

A Real Astrophysicist Takes Issue With Some Key Story Decisions

Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter analyzes the science in Armageddon

, taking issue with some baffling elements. Hitting theaters in 1998, Bay’s iconic disaster movie stars Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck as oil drillers who embark on a mission with their colleagues to save Earth from a mᴀssive, planet-killing asteroid. Armageddon reviews may have been mixed from critics, but audiences couldn’t get enough of the action-packed sci-fi adventure, which features an extended third act that takes place primarily in outer space.

In a recent video for Insider, Sutter breaks down some of Armageddon‘s space sequences, taking issue with one in which Willis’ Harry and his crew use the Moon’s gravity to slingsH๏τ themselves towards the asteroid. The astrophysicist points out that the film gets space wrong in some key ways, including depicting spacecraft as if they are encountering air resistance. Perhaps, the sequence’s biggest sin, though, is not only the fact that experiencing 9.5 Gs for an extended period of time would be fatal, but that the entire Moon slingsH๏τ is entirely unnecessary. Check out Sutter’s explanation and score below:

“When they’re approaching the moon to do that lunar roll, as they called it, they turned their spacecraft towards as if they were fighter jets banking into a turn. But this is space, there’s no air, there’s nothing to bank against. You can just go with it. You’re fine. You’re going to go around the moon, it’s all good.

“So 9.5 G’s means that the pressure you’ll feel, the weight you’ll get pushed up against your chair, is nine-and-a-half times stronger than our normal experience of gravity. This is generally going to be miserable. 9.5 strikes me as a very unrealistic number, especially for that length of time. They’re just going to pᴀss out and be starved of oxygen for 10 minutes, which is death.

“The astronauts are getting a gravity ᴀssist from the Moon so that they can get a speed boost to land on an asteroid. The idea is you need to catch up to it, you need to match speeds with it, otherwise you’re just going to crash into it. So, launching from the surface of the Earth, we can do this. We’ve done rendezvous missions with moving asteroids and comets.

“There’s no reason for them to experience g-forces during a slingsH๏τ maneuver. The whole time you’re doing a slingsH๏τ maneuver, you’re in space. There’s hardly any gravity. You don’t feel any gravity when you’re in space. And when you’re doing this slingsH๏τ maneuver around the Moon, or any object, the Moon is big. Yes, you’re accelerating, but that boost is taking place over the course of hours as you orbit around the Moon. So it’s a very slow and gentle process, so you don’t feel anything extra.

“And I saw them in that clip, they’re like burning their rockets, and I was like, ‘Man, that takes a lot of fuel.’ I was like, ‘If you have enough fuel to be already in space and then do this accelerated boost maneuver, just skip the Moon and you can just go right to the asteroid. That’s why they don’t put me in charge of writing movies. I would rate this clip a three [out of 10].

What Armageddon’s Poor Accuracy Score Means For The Movie’s Legacy

The Film Succeeded Despite Its Ridiculousness

There’s no denying that Armageddon is a silly film. Affleck himself, who plays A. J. Frost in the movie, has pointed out a major flaw with the entire premise of training oil drillers to be astronauts. Affleck’s criticism, which is included on the movie’s now-infamous DVD commentary, posits that it makes far more sense to train astronauts to be drillers, rather than the other way around. The flaws in the storytelling and the prioritization of style over substance resulted in a lackluster Rotten Tomatoes score of 43% from critics.

Clearly, though, audiences were and are generally willing to forgive Armageddon‘s inaccuracies and weaker story elements. This is shown, certainly, in the box office performance, but the Popcornmeter score on Rotten Tomatmoes is also a stronger 73%. There were a number of disaster movies before and after Armageddon, but the Bay movie remains one of the standout entries in the genre alongside other тιтles like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Twister (1996), and Independence Day (1996). As Sutton’s analysis suggests, though, it might be best to not think too hard about the science involved.

Source: Insider