Ben Affleck has revisited his infamous remark about the absurd Armageddon script. He stands by it—and he’s right.
When you think of disaster movies, you inevitably picture the Towering Inferno going up in flames, the Poseidon Adventure soaking the crew, the Twister taking to the skies, the White House getting wrecked in Independence Day, or the Earth getting battered even harder in War of the Worlds.
And of course, there is the indomitable and implausible Armageddon from Michael Bay, in which Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck attempt to stop a giant asteroid with a nuclear payload. Released in 1998, right after Deep Impact, the film was a massive hit, grossing more than $550 million at the worldwide box office on a budget of roughly $140 million.
Among the many reasons Armageddon sticks in memory is Ben Affleck’s audio commentary on the DVD. Why has it become as famous as Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing song? Because he skewers the film in the finest possible way. And the actor insists it’s true.
NB : This piece was highlighted again for Armageddon’s broadcast on W9 on May 25
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All of it can be boiled down to one line, spoken by Ben Affleck in the Armageddon audio commentary:
« I asked Michael Bay why it was easier to train oil rig workers to become astronauts, rather than train astronauts to drill into the ground. He told me to shut my trap, and that ended that discussion. »
In minutes, the actor treated the film’s wildly implausible plot with gleeful mockery, a critique born from the collaboration of J.J. Abrams (yes, that J.J. Abrams) and Jonathan Hensleigh (Speed, The Rock, Armageddon).
In a 2025 interview with GQ, Affleck looked back on the moment that made so many people laugh:
« It’s one of the highlights of my career. I think it’s probably among the top five audio-commentary moments of all time. Nobody said anything to me. I think no one listened to it or cared for years. (…) Everything I said was 100% true, but that’s the point. You’re not supposed to do that and tell the whole truth. »
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Affleck explains that he knew what he had signed up for and understood the rules of the game in a blockbuster like this. Still, he didn’t anticipate such whimsy in the storytelling:
« I never expected something like, ‘Oh, this is going to be genius.’ I thought, I’m going to make a big Hollywood action movie and I love that. And yes, during the film, I was pretty surprised to see that sometimes they didn’t give a damn about whether it made sense. »
I remember Billy Bob Thornton having a long talk about a scene in the space-control room or whatever, and he said, ‘No, it’s fine. I can’t stop talking about it. I don’t much like being in movies that make sense, you know what I mean? But who cares, we’re not going to do that. We won’t do that in this one. Who cares.’ And I was basically the only person saying, ‘Okay, I guess we don’t follow those rules here.’ »
Back then, Affleck had just won an Oscar with Matt Damon for the screenplay of Good Will Hunting. Armageddon was his first dip into mainstream blockbuster productions, and he took away a clear lesson:
« There’s this sense of being small and this thing being huge. So I felt like a little ant on a giant elephant, unable to shut up about the conversation I’d had with Michael Bay—about why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than to train astronauts to drill a hole in the ground. »
Michael Bay didn’t begrudge him the moment, since he later cast Affleck again for Pearl Harbor (2001), another box-office smash with close to $450 million in theaters. And with subsequent roles in Paycheck (2003), Daredevil (2003) or even Hypnotic (2023), there’s little doubt Affleck ultimately made peace with plots that didn’t always make sense.
