by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

In 1998, the world was at peace and the US was rich, unified, and free. The threat of nuclear annihilation, under which we’d lived all our lives, had faded. The spectre of Communism no longer haunted us. History was at an end, we thought. Naturally we began to seek out new fears. We had to go looking for new ways to end the world. Inevitably, we turned toward the skies. 

That year saw two movies about astronomical end of the world scenarios, similar on many ways, but also different as could be. The annals of Hollywood are full of such “twin films,” dueling studio productions out in the same year in order to… well, whatever it is that Hollywood studios are trying to do. Think of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, Antz and A Bug’s Life, Mission to Mars and Red Planet, Barbie and Oppenheimer.

In 1998, it was Earth-killing meteors and comets. Deep Impact (Mimi Leder) premieres on May 5 and goes on to do $349 million. Michael Bay’s Armageddon drops on June 30 and will take in $553 million worldwide, to top the year’s box office. But that’s where the similarities stop. Armageddon goes for the amygdala, the lizard brain. Deep Impact is every bit as manipulative, but it targets the “higher” sensibilities.

In Armageddon, the great Bruce Willis is Harry S. Stamper, head honcho of an offshore oil drilling crew and, we are repeatedly assured, “the best of the best.” We first meet Harry hitting golf balls at Greenpeace protestors from the deck of his oil rig. He’s a roughneck, a no nonsense guy, as plain spoken as his namesake, Harry S Truman. 

As for his crew, they don’t come any more motley. Steve Buscemi is a perv whose underage sex jokes land very poorly today, but he is the best in the business at what he does, whatever that is. Luke Wilson is a groovy golden boy. Michael Clarke Duncan is Bear, rendering his tough guy with a melty heart bit as well as ever. And Ben Affleck, a sweet young Ben Affleck, is AJ, Harry’s heir apparent. In more ways than one, if you take my meaning. He too is the best of the best. 

These good old boys are called on by NASA to join a mission to blow up an Earth-killer meteor which is hurtling toward our planet. Apparently the project needs drillers in order to bury a nuclear weapon deep enough inside the rock to destroy or divert the meteor. Many have questioned the logic of teaching drillers to be astronauts rather than just teaching the astronauts, all highly trained engineers, to run the drill. If you haven’t heard Ben Affleck’s gloriously shit-faced DVD commentary on this question, you need to do so.

But the movie, despite endless time before the mission finally starts, is a hoot. There is a lot of comedy about the squared-away NASA guys and the Regular Joe drillers. Colonel Sharp, the NASA pilot who will get them to space is played by William Fichtner, the most honest character actor in Hollywood since we lost Ben Gazzara. Fichtner wouldn’t know how to phone in a performance if he tried. 

The weirdest scene is definitely a very young Liv Tyler canoodling in post-coital bliss while her father sings on the soundtrack. It’s… a choice. 

Anyway, in a montage, the world eagerly awaits the results of the mission: the French sit in a café watching TV; Indians wear turbans watching TV; East Asians slurp noodles. The filmmakers don’t feature the Inuit community, but if they had the people would no doubt have been eating blubber and rubbing noses and watching TV.

In fact both films do this round the world scene. It’s basically a staple. However different these movies are from each other, each ticks off a number of boxes in the genre – which goes back at least to Meteor, a star-studded flop from 1979 starring Sean Connery and featuring Henry Fonda as the president. The required tropes are as follows:

• Astronomer find an object in the sky. Then there is a lot of breathless running down the corridors in the Pentagon.

• The president is told. He is played by our most trusted middle-aged actor. He is very grave. 

• A team is assembled.

In Armageddon we have the rag tag band of roughnecks, including, as always, a crazy Russian. We loved the Russians in the 90s. Boy, were we wrong. In Deep Impact there is a crazy Russian, too, but the astronauts are classier, led by Robert Duvall and the excellent Mary McCormack. 

Each plot to save the world calls for drilling into the surface of the celestial object and planting nukes. Though in Armageddon, they are way more into the actual drilling process. And each – spoiler alert – hinges on characters sacrificing themselves for the greater good. But before they go into the wild blue yonder the heroes get a chance speak to their families. It is maudlin as hell, but you push on through.  Still, it is because these movies are so similar that it is interesting to filter out the plot and look at everything else. 

Bay is known for blowing shit up of course, but the secret to his success is that he always gets you in the feels, the surging strings, the classic imagery. Heroic men walking in slow mo to a soundtrack of stirring music is more effective at curing anxiety than four out of five SSRIs currently on the market.

“Carla was the prom queen!”

Deep Impact, on the other is hand, is going for a different kind of vibe altogether, a profound blow to the emotions, a steep plunge into the spiritual and philosophical ramifications of the impending Eschaton; how shall I put this? A deeper impact, if you will. 

It’s also classier in production, made by Dreamworks when it was still Dreamworks SKG. Mimi Leder, fresh off the successful Clooney/Kidman thriller The Peacemaker, directs. Tea Leoni is Jenny Lerner and she’s never been more sharp yet flighty, cool yet hot. Playing an ambitious reporter at MSNBC running down a story she thinks is about a corrupt politician, Jenny stumbles across something else entirely. 

It is an ELE, pronounced Ellie (I once dated a girl called Ellie and trust me, the comet is the better part of valor) and it refers to an Extinction Level Event: an Earth-bound comet, to be specific. The government takes extreme measures to cover it up to avoid global panic, following the orders of the president (Morgan Freeman taking on the Henry Fonda role: this is the picture which caused Spike Lee, at the Obama Inauguration, to quip: “Well, I guess a meteor must be coming.”)

This world is far from the biker bars and drill rigs of Armageddon. This is Manhattan, and Jenny Lerner’s cultured European parents are Maximillian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave. Schell’s Jason Lerner is polished but burly like a wise Swiss bear. Redgrave, with whom I fell vastly in love while watching Camelot as a child – is elegant and dignified. Her Robin confronts the prospect of imminent death with formidable grace.

In the end, Leoni’s Jenny will get to the truth and will ride it to career success with one stop off at betrayal of a colleague and mentor, a success that hits at precisely the moment it becomes clear how pointless practical success is. 

Deep Impact spends much more time on the characters, facing death. The screenplay, by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, takes more of an interest in what it might feel like to face the end of the world. Probably something we all ought to be thinking about right now. 

I hate that we reduce everything to politics now, but it must be said: Armageddon is the red state picture; Deep Impact is blue state. But who cares? Ideology is one way to see a movie, but there are so many others – craft, aesthetics, emotion – though you wouldn’t know that from a lot of online film and TV criticism. 

By any measure, Deep Impact is the “better” movie. The writing is smarter, the talented actors deliver serious performances; the whole thing is tasteful as hell.

But on another level, Armageddon might be a purer piece of art, exactly because it is unconcerned with anything beyond being the film it is, and pleasing the audience. Formula genre movies can be like a sonnet: a restrictive form which calls on the artist to use all of their creativity to do something fresh that’s been done before. It’s harder to do, and therefore when it’s done well it makes for, often, a better cinema experience.

Michael Bay is making an action movie, and he knows how to do that in the way that John Ford knew how to make westerns and Alfred Hitchcock knew how to make suspense thrillers. So, okay, maybe Rear Window this is not, but it’s a hell of a ride nonetheless.