MOVIE NEWS – There’s a reason Michael Bay movies fill theaters, but never make it into science class. Armageddon is one of the director’s most bombastic action blockbusters, yet the story is so absurd that even the cast, like Ben Affleck, love to poke fun at it—just check out his legendary audio commentary. Now, NASA experts have torn the film apart, much like the amateur oil drillers in the movie try (and fail) to blow up the asteroid.

In an interview with inews, astrophysicist Alastair Bruce didn’t mince words when breaking down Armageddon’s so-called “science.” He began by pointing out that the size of the incoming asteroid is already completely unrealistic. “That rock is just too damn big. That’s what makes it so fun to talk about—Hollywood went big, and then they went way too big… When we’re talking about one-kilometer-wide rocks, that’s scary; that could wipe out an entire region on Earth. Luckily, these are rare, but that’s what our telescopes are for.”

“You’d be able to spot an asteroid like that with the naked eye months before it hit. In Armageddon, they don’t see it until 18 days before impact. Seriously? It would be visible. People would look up and say, ‘What the hell is that?’”

The “Plan” in Armageddon Is Pure Nonsense

Let’s be honest: If a Texas-sized asteroid were headed our way, some government agency isn’t going to call up oil drillers to ride rockets into space and save the planet. Bruce continued: “Everything just vaporizes. That’s bad for a lot of reasons. Even if you managed to vaporize the entire rock, that material is still headed for Earth at a ridiculous speed. All you’d do is spread out the impact.”

“Some of the locations in the movie really are NASA sites—the launch pads are real, they just look cooler with CGI. The training centers are genuine; NASA really did help out during filming. But the actual science? It’s a joke.”

Even so, all of this can’t stop Armageddon from being exactly the kind of over-the-top, fist-pumping spectacle that keeps cinemas alive—a perfect way to kill a couple of hours watching A-listers do something ludicrous, even if none of it makes sense. It may not be logical, but it’s still cinema.

Source: inews