Armageddon vs Deep Impact Why Michael Bays Movie Won

Armageddon vs Deep Impact: Why Michael Bay’s Movie Won

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Meteor movies Armageddon and Deep Impact came out within weeks of each other in 1998. Why is Armageddon the movie that everyone remembers?

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Armageddon vs Deep Impact Why Michael Bays Movie Won

Michael Bay’s Armageddon and Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact are two movies about planet Earth facing mass extinction via meteor, which released within weeks of each other in summer 1998. But while both were box office hits that garnered similarly mixed reviews, Armageddon is the movie that enjoyed more sustained popularity and is better remembered more than two decades later.

The release of Deep Impact and Armageddon so close to one another is an example of a Hollywood phenomenon of “twin films,” wherein two major studios will develop very similar movies in a race to the top of the box office. Other such pairs of movies include Pixar’s A Bug’s Life and DreamWorks Animation’s Antz, rom-coms No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, and save-the-president duo White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen.

When two similar movies compete head-to-head it’s almost inevitable that one will emerge victorious, but the race between Armageddon and Deep Impact was actually closer than moviegoers may remember. Both have a critics score of 45% on Rotten Tomatoes, and while Armageddon made more money at the box office, it also had a considerably bigger budget than Deep Impact, making the movies evenly matched in terms of profitability. So, why was it Armageddon that ended up standing the test of time?

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Armageddon Has A Happier Ending Than Deep Impact

Armageddon vs Deep Impact Why Michael Bays Movie Won

Blockbuster Hollywood movies and the audiences that watch them aren’t exactly averse to sad endings. In fact, making the audience cry in the third act can generally be considered a win. Armageddon itself has a tearjerker moment when Bruce Willis’ Harry Stamper nobly sacrifices his own life to destroy the impending meteor to save Earth and allow his daughter’s fiance to return home to her. But whereas Armageddon’s sad ending is tinged with victory over an adversary and ultimately allows the planet to be spared a meteor strike, Deep Impact’s ending is much more mixed.

In Leder’s movie, the brave astronauts all sacrifice their lives in order to destroy one of the meteors headed to Earth – the one that will cause the greater devastation. However, the other meteor is not stopped and strikes in the ocean, unleashing a megatsunami. Téa Leoni’s journalist Jenny Lerner, one of the movie’s lead characters, quietly accepts her death in the tsunami after reconciling with her estranged father. The entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States is wiped out, with millions killed. At the end of the movie, President Beck (Morgan Freeman) delivers a sobering speech about the lives lost, countless people left homeless, and the need to rebuild.

In contrast, Armageddon ends with the surviving astronauts returning home as heroes and being reunited with their families, while Harry’s legacy is that of the man who saved the entire world. It’s a much more traditionally clean-cut Hollywood happy ending, and concludes the movie on a high note.

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Armageddon Isn’t Better Than Deep Impact – But It Is More Fun

Despite appearing to have almost identical storylines, Armageddon and Deep Impact are actually very different movies. Leder’s film spends a lot more time on the ground with characters like Jenny and teenage astronomy enthusiast Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood), who gets the dubious honor of having one of the meteors named after him. As audiences have come to expect from Bay, Armageddon is action-packed from start to finish as the drillers-turned-astronauts deal with multiple disastrous situations in space and lose crew members along the way. In Deep Impact, most of the tension is derived not from immediately explosive circumstances, but from the tension of whether or not the meteors will strike Earth, and how the human race will survive if they do.

That Armageddon has thrived in pop culture really comes down to a matter of genre; middling action movies have more rewatch value than middling drama films. Where Deep Impact took itself mostly seriously, Armageddon embraced the fun and absurdity of blue-collar workers being sent into space to fight a meteor. As maligned as Michael Bay might be by critics and cinephiles, there’s no denying that he’s in his element when he’s making movies about explosions – and explosions don’t come much bigger than blowing up a meteor with a nuke.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/armageddon-vs-deep-impact-movies-comparison-better-won/

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