Ben Affleck, looking deep into Bruce Willis’ eyes, and glimpsing one potential career path for himself.
Armageddon (listed online under The Nerdonauts) plays for one night only at the Trylon Cinema on Thursday, January 16th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering just how annoyed a lot of movie people were around the turn of the century that Michael Bay’s Armageddon was included as #40 in the lineup of the Criterion Collection. There it was, on your DVD shelf, between Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (#39) and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (#41). What on earth were they thinking? The Criterion Collection was supposed to be a refuge from the stupidity and excesses of the marketplace, an imposing, impeccably curated museum of film where even genre pictures underrated in their own time (like, for example, Tokyo Drifter) that parochial American audiences might have overlooked in a DVD cutout bin were given the full treatment: beautiful packaging, well-written essays, full remastering, tons of extras, and—that great cinematic innovation of the era—an erudite, insightful commentary track or two, by either the filmmakers or critics. These commentaries were a major part of many budding filmmakers’ cinematic education, and the reputation of the Criterion Collection’s programmers’ good taste ensured that whatever came out was going to be something worthwhile, whether you’d heard of it or not. Though Criterion’s early years as a distributor of LaserDisc releases of both popular and critical cinema included box office smashes, like some of the early James Bond movies, Armageddon was the first entry that was pretty explicitly something you could have seen at a suburban multiplex with your high school buds. Before that, Silence of the Lambs and RoboCop came closest—and though they were both massive hits, not many cinephiles would put Michael Bay in the same company as Jonathan Demme or Paul Verhoeven.
I’m not exempting myself from this free-floating snobbery and sense of annoyance and betrayal here. I was 19 years old in 1999 and certainly as snobby as they came, and you wouldn’t have caught me at the suburban megaplex seeing Armageddon. (Who had time for that crap? It was 1998! Terence Malick was back!) I saw Armageddon, like a lot of people in my cohort, when a completist friend who worked at a used DVD store brought it home and made us all watch it. His argument was that it has what his coworker claimed was the funniest commentary track he’d ever heard.
There are actually two commentary tracks on the Criterion edition, both of which are excellent. The less-remembered one is cinematographer John Schwartzman paired with NASA consultant Dr. Joe Allen and NASA engineer Ivan Bekey. Schwartzmann is professional and inoffensive throughout. Dr. Allen and Bekey are not. They have a great time sailing through the planetoid-sized plot holes in Bay’s movie with the grace and effortlessness of the waltzing spaceliners at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (“NASA has very strict rules about astronauts going berserk in orbit,” one of them deadpans at one point.) As great as that track is, it’s still not quite as good as the one from Bay, Affleck, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Bay and Bruckheimer are as glib and self-aware as you’d expect—there’s a great story from Bay about how $20,000 of the multimillion-dollar budget was getting Affleck’s “baby teeth” capped so he’d look appropriately godlike when shot from below. Affleck’s teeth may not have been up to the job, but his critical faculties are. He’s in top form throughout.
There’s a reason why, of all the major actors of his generation, Affleck still attracts a certain amount of popular attention from the filmgoing public, almost three decades into his career. Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, and Affleck’s old buddy Matt Damon are all roughly the same age as him and have been in and out of the public eye for the same period of time. Aside from maybe DiCaprio, though, they’re not memed with the same fervor as Affleck. There’s a possibly apocryphal story that David Fincher cast Affleck as a guy that no one believes didn’t kill his wife in Gone Girl after seeing him grimacing awkwardly through press conferences in so many Twitter memes. It’s in part because Affleck’s default expression seems to be one of resigned exhaustion, but that’s only part of it. Lots of actors look annoyed and tired when they get photographed buying coffee at 9 o’clock in the morning. Affleck’s demeanor, paired with what we know about his public, personal, and professional lives, has always suggested there’s a lot of complicated feelings in there that, say, Mark Wahlberg doesn’t possess.
Armageddon came at a critical point in Affleck’s career. It was his first major commercial role after Good Will Hunting. Up to that point, Affleck had kind of made a niche for himself in indie-adjacent movies as either a jerk who still charming (Dazed and Confused), or a charmer who was a bit of a jerk (Mallrats). But lest we forget, he was also a writer, having won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. His two other colleagues on the Armageddon drilling team, Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson, are also accomplished writers responsible for co-writing at least two great movies (I’d argue Tree’s Lounge and Rushmore are much better written movies than Good Will Hunting.) Because Damon and Affleck’s origin story was so good, though Affleck is the guy we still think of having literary ambitions, still aiming to run off and write a masterpiece. That’s perhaps why the Internet still projects so much on him: we have different expectations for writers than we do for “just” actors. In the Sad Affleck-ization of the actor’s public persona, you forget that he’s actually a really funny guy. I mean, he’s been charming enough to make me partially enjoy at least two Kevin Smith movies, which is a task that almost no other human has ever managed to accomplish.
Criterion must have sensed that Armageddon’s inclusion would raise some eyebrows, so the DVD includes an essay that goes on the defensive right away by the great film historian Jeanine Basinger—who also just so happens to have been Michael Bay’s professor at Wesleyan when he was an undergrad there. Basinger connects Bay’s movie to the mid-century blue collar-focused output of Warner Brothers. Like those WB flicks by Raoul Walsh and William Wellman, it’s a film that lionizes working-class stiffs faced with daunting odds. “This film makes these ordinary men noble, lifting their efforts up into an epic event,” she writes. “Here, working men are not only saving the overeducated scientists and politicians who can’t do anything (and who probably went to Yale and Harvard), but, incidentally, the entire population of the planet.” (I will note here that I am all for us plebes dumping on the Ivys, but come on, Basinger and Bay were both at Wesleyan, a school that is actually more expensivethan Yale—not exactly vo-tech.)
I get the argument here, but the genius of Affleck’s commentary track is how easily he dismantles that entire line of thinking with a few lines. The best-known and best-loved part of the commentary is Affleck’s quick assessment of how patronizingly stupid the idea is that NASA engineers couldn’t figure out how to build a drill. “I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch, let’s face it,” he says. “They don’t know jack about drilling? How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on.” Most of the writers Affleck has worked with over the years, even the most celebrated ones, have never written a line so perfect and funny.
In 2023, the entertainment website Collider called Affleck’s commentary on Armageddon “the best ever” example of the form, and even went so far as to call it “the best performance ever given by the actor.” That’s a little disingenuous—Affleck’s had plenty of good performances over the years, and often they’re his most self-referential performances. There’s the aforementioned Gone Girl, but I’d also argue (perhaps foolishly) that his portrayal of Batman in that dumb Zach Snyder movie is his best, because it’s so suffused with our own meta-knowledge of Affleck: he plays an attractive rich guy who insists on grimly pursuing a professional calling that he seems to absolutely hate, and that makes him and everyone around him totally miserable.
The Armageddon commentary is, then, if not his best performance, perhaps one of the purest distillations of all the things that Affleck does well, and that we as a moviegoing public expect of him—an equally Batman-like meta-commentary on Ben Affleck the Frustrated Writer, Ben Affleck the College Town Cut-Up, and Ben Affleck the Contradictory Public Figure. He’s charming, funny, self-aware, smart, a little rude, quick on his feet, and good company. If the Criterion Collection promoted Armageddon to the pantheon with the sole purpose of coaxing this performance out of Ben Affleck and preserve it for future generations, then it was all worth it.
Aim the Drill at the Ground and Turn It On: Ben Affleck, Armageddon, and the Golden Age of the DVD Commentary
| Andy Strudevant |
Ben Affleck, looking deep into Bruce Willis’ eyes, and glimpsing one potential career path for himself.
Armageddon (listed online under The Nerdonauts) plays for one night only at the Trylon Cinema on Thursday, January 16th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering just how annoyed a lot of movie people were around the turn of the century that Michael Bay’s Armageddon was included as #40 in the lineup of the Criterion Collection. There it was, on your DVD shelf, between Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (#39) and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (#41). What on earth were they thinking? The Criterion Collection was supposed to be a refuge from the stupidity and excesses of the marketplace, an imposing, impeccably curated museum of film where even genre pictures underrated in their own time (like, for example, Tokyo Drifter) that parochial American audiences might have overlooked in a DVD cutout bin were given the full treatment: beautiful packaging, well-written essays, full remastering, tons of extras, and—that great cinematic innovation of the era—an erudite, insightful commentary track or two, by either the filmmakers or critics. These commentaries were a major part of many budding filmmakers’ cinematic education, and the reputation of the Criterion Collection’s programmers’ good taste ensured that whatever came out was going to be something worthwhile, whether you’d heard of it or not. Though Criterion’s early years as a distributor of LaserDisc releases of both popular and critical cinema included box office smashes, like some of the early James Bond movies, Armageddon was the first entry that was pretty explicitly something you could have seen at a suburban multiplex with your high school buds. Before that, Silence of the Lambs and RoboCop came closest—and though they were both massive hits, not many cinephiles would put Michael Bay in the same company as Jonathan Demme or Paul Verhoeven.
I’m not exempting myself from this free-floating snobbery and sense of annoyance and betrayal here. I was 19 years old in 1999 and certainly as snobby as they came, and you wouldn’t have caught me at the suburban megaplex seeing Armageddon. (Who had time for that crap? It was 1998! Terence Malick was back!) I saw Armageddon, like a lot of people in my cohort, when a completist friend who worked at a used DVD store brought it home and made us all watch it. His argument was that it has what his coworker claimed was the funniest commentary track he’d ever heard.
There are actually two commentary tracks on the Criterion edition, both of which are excellent. The less-remembered one is cinematographer John Schwartzman paired with NASA consultant Dr. Joe Allen and NASA engineer Ivan Bekey. Schwartzmann is professional and inoffensive throughout. Dr. Allen and Bekey are not. They have a great time sailing through the planetoid-sized plot holes in Bay’s movie with the grace and effortlessness of the waltzing spaceliners at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (“NASA has very strict rules about astronauts going berserk in orbit,” one of them deadpans at one point.) As great as that track is, it’s still not quite as good as the one from Bay, Affleck, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Bay and Bruckheimer are as glib and self-aware as you’d expect—there’s a great story from Bay about how $20,000 of the multimillion-dollar budget was getting Affleck’s “baby teeth” capped so he’d look appropriately godlike when shot from below. Affleck’s teeth may not have been up to the job, but his critical faculties are. He’s in top form throughout.
There’s a reason why, of all the major actors of his generation, Affleck still attracts a certain amount of popular attention from the filmgoing public, almost three decades into his career. Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, and Affleck’s old buddy Matt Damon are all roughly the same age as him and have been in and out of the public eye for the same period of time. Aside from maybe DiCaprio, though, they’re not memed with the same fervor as Affleck. There’s a possibly apocryphal story that David Fincher cast Affleck as a guy that no one believes didn’t kill his wife in Gone Girl after seeing him grimacing awkwardly through press conferences in so many Twitter memes. It’s in part because Affleck’s default expression seems to be one of resigned exhaustion, but that’s only part of it. Lots of actors look annoyed and tired when they get photographed buying coffee at 9 o’clock in the morning. Affleck’s demeanor, paired with what we know about his public, personal, and professional lives, has always suggested there’s a lot of complicated feelings in there that, say, Mark Wahlberg doesn’t possess.
Armageddon came at a critical point in Affleck’s career. It was his first major commercial role after Good Will Hunting. Up to that point, Affleck had kind of made a niche for himself in indie-adjacent movies as either a jerk who still charming (Dazed and Confused), or a charmer who was a bit of a jerk (Mallrats). But lest we forget, he was also a writer, having won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. His two other colleagues on the Armageddon drilling team, Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson, are also accomplished writers responsible for co-writing at least two great movies (I’d argue Tree’s Lounge and Rushmore are much better written movies than Good Will Hunting.) Because Damon and Affleck’s origin story was so good, though Affleck is the guy we still think of having literary ambitions, still aiming to run off and write a masterpiece. That’s perhaps why the Internet still projects so much on him: we have different expectations for writers than we do for “just” actors. In the Sad Affleck-ization of the actor’s public persona, you forget that he’s actually a really funny guy. I mean, he’s been charming enough to make me partially enjoy at least two Kevin Smith movies, which is a task that almost no other human has ever managed to accomplish.
Criterion must have sensed that Armageddon’s inclusion would raise some eyebrows, so the DVD includes an essay that goes on the defensive right away by the great film historian Jeanine Basinger—who also just so happens to have been Michael Bay’s professor at Wesleyan when he was an undergrad there. Basinger connects Bay’s movie to the mid-century blue collar-focused output of Warner Brothers. Like those WB flicks by Raoul Walsh and William Wellman, it’s a film that lionizes working-class stiffs faced with daunting odds. “This film makes these ordinary men noble, lifting their efforts up into an epic event,” she writes. “Here, working men are not only saving the overeducated scientists and politicians who can’t do anything (and who probably went to Yale and Harvard), but, incidentally, the entire population of the planet.” (I will note here that I am all for us plebes dumping on the Ivys, but come on, Basinger and Bay were both at Wesleyan, a school that is actually more expensive than Yale—not exactly vo-tech.)
I get the argument here, but the genius of Affleck’s commentary track is how easily he dismantles that entire line of thinking with a few lines. The best-known and best-loved part of the commentary is Affleck’s quick assessment of how patronizingly stupid the idea is that NASA engineers couldn’t figure out how to build a drill. “I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch, let’s face it,” he says. “They don’t know jack about drilling? How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on.” Most of the writers Affleck has worked with over the years, even the most celebrated ones, have never written a line so perfect and funny.
In 2023, the entertainment website Collider called Affleck’s commentary on Armageddon “the best ever” example of the form, and even went so far as to call it “the best performance ever given by the actor.” That’s a little disingenuous—Affleck’s had plenty of good performances over the years, and often they’re his most self-referential performances. There’s the aforementioned Gone Girl, but I’d also argue (perhaps foolishly) that his portrayal of Batman in that dumb Zach Snyder movie is his best, because it’s so suffused with our own meta-knowledge of Affleck: he plays an attractive rich guy who insists on grimly pursuing a professional calling that he seems to absolutely hate, and that makes him and everyone around him totally miserable.
The Armageddon commentary is, then, if not his best performance, perhaps one of the purest distillations of all the things that Affleck does well, and that we as a moviegoing public expect of him—an equally Batman-like meta-commentary on Ben Affleck the Frustrated Writer, Ben Affleck the College Town Cut-Up, and Ben Affleck the Contradictory Public Figure. He’s charming, funny, self-aware, smart, a little rude, quick on his feet, and good company. If the Criterion Collection promoted Armageddon to the pantheon with the sole purpose of coaxing this performance out of Ben Affleck and preserve it for future generations, then it was all worth it.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon