Office Ladies Do: Armageddon!

This week on Office Ladies 6.0, prepare yourselves for Armageddon! Not the actual end of days, but Michael Bay’s two-and-a-half-hour disaster film from 1998! Jenna and Angela answer the call of fan requests and dive into a full breakdown of the iconic summer blockbuster. The ladies kick things off by revisiting the deep-cut Office lore surrounding Michael and Dwight’s New Years Eve watch party, before breaking down the facts, stats, and wild behind-the-scenes stories from the movie. Along the way, Angela shares her own real-life Michael Bay encounter, Jenna counts down the eight steps to space mission success, and the crew reflects on why this messy, explosion-filled movie is so hard not to love. So put on your space suit, break out the animal crackers and enjoy! You don’t wanna miss a thing… Office Ladies Website - Submit a fan question for Around the Town, Chit Chat, and Second Drink favorite moment:https://officeladies.com/submitaquestion Follow Us on Instagram:OfficeLadiesPod https://www.instagram.com/officeladiespod/ Follow Us on YouTube https://youtube.com/@officeladiespod?si=D0oKJwFJuK9txzFM Follow Us on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@officeladiespod?_t=ZT-8y1gqTrJyOs&_r=1

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is the Earth at a time when the dinosaurs roamed a lush, fertile planet.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  A piece of rock just six miles wide changed all that.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  It hit with a force of 10,000 nuclear weapons.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere, creating a suffocating blanket of dust. The sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  It happened before.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  It will happen again.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  It's just a question of when.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Everyone buckle in for Armageddon.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We were on The Office together and we're best friends.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  And now we're doing the ultimate Office lovers podcast just for you. Each week we will dive deeper into the world of The Office with exclusive interviews, behind the scenes details, and lots of BFF stories. We're the Office Lady 6.0.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Hello, everyone.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Hey. We have a big, big episode today.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  We really do.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Welcome to our breakdown of the 1998 summer blockbuster Armageddon.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Boom, boom, boom.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Explosions. So many explosions.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  So many.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  We said we might do this a while back and we got mail. Amber W. from Brighton, Michigan, wrote us to say, "You mentioned doing a watch of Armageddon and you guys will podcast the crap out of that. I need it in my life." And Kelly B. from Westfield, Indiana, who listens with her family, said, "I've been listening to your podcast since the first episode and it's truly my favorite one I listen to. We desperately want you to break down Armageddon. You mentioned it and we are all in. I showed it to my kids recently because you mentioned it and it is so bad. We totally need you to break it down. Please, please."

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Podcast the crap out of something might be my new favorite expression, Amber. You guys also know that this movie, Armageddon, does live in the lore of The Office.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  We briefly discussed this movie in the very early days of our podcast when we broke down the episode, "The Fight." So you guys, if you remember, Michael Scott is wanting Jim to punch him really hard in the stomach and Jim suggests that he have Dwight do it. And then we learn this tidbit about Michael and Dwight.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Go ahead. Do it.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Just have Dwight punch you.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, that would be kind of worthless because I know a ton of 14-year-old girls that could kick his ass.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  You know a ton of 14-year-old girls?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  What belt are they? Look, Dwight is a wuss. When we rented Armageddon, he cried at the end of it.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Michael, I told you. That was because it was New Year's Eve and it started to snow at exactly midnight.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Bruce Willis, I could leave him on the asteroid. Boo.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll punch you.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Here we go. All right. Come on. Get out. Fuck.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Amazing. So Michael and Dwight watched Armageddon on New Year's Eve. And now, lady, we have watched it.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  We have.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  There's so much to discuss, but let's dive into the facts and stats.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll kick us off. As you said, Jenna, it was released in 1998 on July 1st.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  So kind of like around the July 4th holiday.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Here's a little description. "After discovering that an asteroid the size of Texas will impact Earth in less than a month, NASA recruits a misfit team of deep core drillers to save the planet."

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Want to hear the tagline?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  I do.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  It's so good. Ready?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  "It's closer than you think."

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  I feel like that's what she said.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I have another tagline.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  What?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  "Explosions and yelling."

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Oh, that's very good.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Okay. It was rated PG-13. Jenna, I haven't told you, we don't know what each other are both sharing today, guys.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  It's been very hard not to share my thoughts about this movie with you. I've been sharing them a little bit with Sam because I couldn't help myself.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, you needed someone to bear witness.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  We have been living in a vacuum. But Jenna, I want to tell you something right now. I know more about this movie than I feel like I did about any subject I took in college. There is a DVD commentary that has been lost. You can't find it anymore. It was on a LaserDisc.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  I found it online.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  It's 2 hours and 35 minutes. It's Michael Bay, Bruce Willis, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Ben Affleck. I listened to it.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  The whole thing?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  I crapped out at about 2 hours. Okay, so the last 35 minutes, I was like, I get it now, lady. It is one of the most insane rides of your life. Like, I want you to go on a road trip and listen to it. Anyway, all that to say, I know why they wanted a PG-13 movie.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Tell us.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Okay. Ask me any kind of random shit as we break this down. Michael Bay said, and I'm quoting him, that his grandfather said to him, "If you want to make a lot of money, find something you can sell to middle America."

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  He said this movie's patriotic. He wanted it to be PG-13, even though that meant he had to dumb down some of it so 13-year-olds could get it, but then also still make it exciting enough for the adults in the audience. And he thinks he accomplished that. And I think he did too.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  He did?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, this movie is 2 hours and 31 minutes.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Right. The commentary's just a few minutes longer.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  That's what I was gonna ask you.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  2 hours and 35 minutes.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, it is real long.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Real long. Did you see this in theaters? Do you remember the first time you saw it?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I did see it in theaters.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And I don't have a strong memory of seeing it and I'm confused by that now because...

• 6:53Speaker 00

  You're like, how could I not remember?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  How could I not remember that?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  I mean, I saw it, and I shared this when we broke down "The Fight" for Office Ladies, that I saw it with my dad, who is a drilling engineer.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  A deep sea drilling engineer, like on oil rigs.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Out in the ocean.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Like where we meet Bruce Willis and his team.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I went and saw this movie with my dad and I'm gonna share some of his reactions later.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  I can't wait.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  But yeah, so what I don't know is how I made it through the movie without peeing like four times.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you probably went to the bathroom several times.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  I had to have.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Matt, Sam, do you remember seeing this movie for the first time? Did you see it in theaters?

• 7:35Speaker 04

  No, I never saw this until a week ago.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  No way.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  No, this movie, this was all brand new to me.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh. What were your thoughts?

• 7:46Speaker 04

  I'll let you know as we go. I took detailed notes.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, please let us know. Okay.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Matt?

• 7:53Speaker 05

  I definitely saw it in theaters. The only thing I really remembered from the movie was the animal cracker scene. I don't know what that says about me, but it's literally the only thing that I could tell you about this movie.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Why?

• 8:05Speaker 05

  I know. I was taking notes. I was like, okay, animal crackers. Got it.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  No, God, please tell me you never have recreated this moment. Please tell me you've been busted out with animal crackers on a lady's belly.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Guys, doesn't Michael Scott reference animal crackers in something about wooing a woman?

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Sexy time?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I swear. I swear.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh. Someone Google it. Wait, Jenna, what'd you find? She's looking very excited.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Okay, according to Dunderpedia, in "Threat Level Midnight," there is a flashback scene of Michael Scarn and his wife. And one of the sequences is a take on the scene where Ben Affleck puts the animal cracker on Liv Tyler's stomach. So two Armageddon references in The Office, folks.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  This is the brilliance of The Office, though. You think something's mentioned and it's like, oh, will we ever see that again? And then it is woven back in.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  From "The Fight" all the way to...

• 9:08Speaker 00

  "Threat Level Midnight." All right, Jenna, do you have any stats for us?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, like you mentioned earlier, Angela, the director of this movie is Michael Bay.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Have you ever met Michael Bay?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  No. Have you?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Sort of.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Sort of? How do you sort of meet someone?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  I can't believe I've never told you this story in all of our years of friendship.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Okay, here's my Michael Bay story. So I was performing at Improv Olympic and then a friend of ours who also performed there worked at a restaurant. And if we could get there before 9:00 PM, he could get us like free appetizer. But then after 9:00, they lowered the lights and it turned into like a nightclub.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  What is your age?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I'm like 25, 26 years old, somewhere in there. So we do our improv show and we haul ass over there so we can get in before 9:00 and get a free...

• 9:56Speaker 01

  To get some free apps.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Free apps. We're in a booth and it is like 9 o'clock hits, the lights lower, and all of a sudden music's like, "Deez, deez, deez." And I'm like, oh my gosh. In walks Michael Bay and Dan Aykroyd.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Together.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  What?

• 10:12Speaker 00

  With like a group of gals. Michael Bay had hair like long wispy hair parted on the side, kind of feathered.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  It was very Fabio.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Very Fabio, just wispy feathered hair.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  He had on a suede western jacket with like fringe.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  And jeans.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Okay. Is this pre Armageddon or after Armageddon? Was this pre 1998 or after 1990?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  This is pre. This is like maybe The Rock.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Yeah?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Okay. He comes in with Dan Aykroyd and the ladies. They sit at the booth right behind us. I am back to back with Michael Bay. Like my hair, if I tilted back, could touch his wispy.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Hair.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Hair.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  And then when the music started, the gals got up, they were dancing. Other people danced too. This place turned into a club. But yeah, Michael Bay and I sat back to back.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  That's a nuts story.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  It's a nuts story. Like you're like just sitting there eating your cheese sticks and Dan Aykroyd and Michael Bay walk in?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  And Michael Bay looks like a character out of like a seventies western movie.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  I can't believe this story doesn't end with an explosion of some kind.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Well, we had to leave because that after nine o'clock, the tables were reserved. So we got booted out.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  But I was there long enough to see that crazy duo.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  I'm glad we watched this movie just so I could hear that story. All right. Let's talk about the writers of this movie. In the credits at the beginning of the movie, it lists screenplay by Jonathan Hensley and J.J. Abrams. J.J. Abrams.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  That was a surprise.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  But on IMDb, there are a lot of other people listed under the writing category with additional multiple titles.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. I had a writing professor that said tip of the hat if a script went through a ton of changes is if you have adaptation by, story by, we had all of this.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  In this movie?

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  We had adaptation by Tony Gilroy and Shane Salerno. We had story by Robert Roy Poole and Jonathan Hensley as well. So a lot of chefs here.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, this movie has a lot of stars. Pretty much all of them men. They are Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Will Patton, Steepie Shemmy, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, William Fitchner, and also Liv Tyler.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I can't really imagine anyone else but Bruce Willis in this role of Harry Stamper as the lead oil driller guy.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  He really held this movie together for me. But did you know that Sean Connery was originally considered for the role? But Michael Bay decided to cast someone younger after meeting some actual oil drillers.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Surprising to me that he ever did meet real oil drillers, but okay.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. They did their homework. I will tell you that. Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  They did.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  They did. They had Joe.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  They did their homework about NASA, the space program and oil drilling. And then they were like, fuck it.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  They threw it all out. No, they did.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  We learned all about it. We're not gonna put any of it in the movie.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  They did. They had, they, you know, had real, like, but with real drilling engineers. They had Joe Allen, who's an astronaut, like consult. And Ben Affleck will say in the DVD, we used some of it.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's very funny to me because so much of the first third of the movie is just them explaining why they're gonna do things that make actually no sense in real life.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  No sense. Also Jerry Bruckheimer shares that they offered this role to Liv Tyler five times before she accepted it. It was on the fifth time that she finally was like, other actors have been added by that point, Billy Bob, all, you know, and she was like, okay.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  I thought she was great.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I did too.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I actually really liked her.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  I know.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Bradley Cooper auditioned for the role of A.J. Frost. Can't imagine anyone but Ben Affleck.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  I know.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I don't know. I thought everybody was very well cast in this movie.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Same.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Incidentally, the budget for this film, I watched this movie with my son and after the first sequence in New York, he said, how much did this movie cost? It cost $140 million. In the US and Canada, it made $201.5 million at the box office. And the gross worldwide was $553.7 million. So it made its money back and then some.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Okay. So it was a hit.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  It was a hit. At the box office. Angela, what did the critics have to say?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Well, they have a lot to say. I'm just gonna share basically Roger Ebert, who gave it one star. I'm quoting him. He said, "The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained." He also went on to say, "The plot covers many of the same bases as the recent Deep Impact, which compared with Armageddon, belongs on the American Film Institute list." Michael Bay did take some issue with Deep Impact.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Oh, Deep Impact was like a whole thing. It had just come out.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Two giant movies about asteroids hurling themselves towards Earth.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I watched some of the press junket.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Of the actors promoting this movie.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  You did?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yes. And they kept getting asked about Deep Impact.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  And you can just see how pissed they are. Interestingly enough, I had read that as well about Roger Ebert and hating it. I believe he lists it as the movie he hates more than any other movie in his compilation list. It's at the very bottom of like every movie he's ever seen in his whole life. He really, really hated this movie.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Gene Siskel, on the other hand, gave it a thumbs up.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Did they hate each other? Did the two of them hate each other?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Is that Siskel punking Ebert because he knows how much he hated it?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  I don't know. Just to get under his skin. I'm not sure. But yeah. He said that he found that the sensory overload actually became bizarrely audacious and amusing.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Huh. Well, you know, Michael Bay was quoted as saying in an interview that the whole movie, they shot in 16 weeks. He said it was a massive undertaking and it wasn't fair to the movie. He said he would like to redo the entire third act if he could because the studio literally took the movie away from him. He said it was terrible. He said his visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  I'm not surprised.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  I know. So then he had to take charge. He said he actually called James Cameron and said, what do you do when you're doing all the effects by yourself? But then he ended, the interviewer was saying, but the movie did fine. So.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  It got 43% on the Rotten Tomatoes tomato meter, but it's 73% on the popcorn meter. Folks liked it.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Okay. So this really tracks for me about this movie. I became very fascinated by the film's award nominations because it was nominated for four Academy Awards. Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Song by Diane Warren. I don't want to miss a thing, performed by Aerosmith. But then it also got nominated for seven Razzie Awards.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  It was nominated for Worst Picture, Worst Actor Bruce Willis, Worst On-Screen Couple Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, Worst Supporting Actress Liv Tyler.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Original Song.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I guess there's also something called the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Bruce Willis won the Stinker Award for Worst Actor and Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler won a stinker for Worst On-Screen Couple. But then at the MTV Movie Awards, the movie was nominated for Best Movie. Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck were nominated for Best Actor and Actress and also Best On-Screen Duo. Bruce Willis was also nominated for Best Actor at the Saturn Awards and the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards. He actually won that one. It was also nominated by the Japanese Academy for Best Foreign Film.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And it won the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film. I have to say, this really accurately summed up my feelings about the film. Because as I was watching this movie.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  First you texted me.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And I said, this is the worst movie I've ever seen in my life.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I don't know how I'm gonna watch the whole thing.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  But then as it went on, I found myself saying, I fucking love this movie.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  So I both hate it and think it's terrible, and I also think it's one of the best movies ever made.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  I took several guesses at what the parts were that turned your viewing of it around.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a real journey.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cause I also hated it at the start.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And then did you love it?

• 19:20Speaker 04

  I love it. It reminds me of bad bands that I like. There's so many albums that I know are terrible that I love.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know. There's something about it. Matt, what about you?

• 19:30Speaker 04

  I, it didn't hold up as well for me. I feel like the, watching it this time, the story felt really ridiculous, but I did admire the scale and the shots of it. And, and yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  And for me, it reminded me, I'm sure, how much bad improv have you seen where the actors commit to being pimped out on stage? This is what it reminded me of. Like, everybody's commitment to this is insane. Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, they all commit to this as if it's really happening.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  The commitment of the whole movie to the premise is really impressive.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  It takes itself very seriously.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Listen, if full blown out wispy hair suede tassel jacket man is walking up to you, he's gonna take the movie to the next level.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  This is the only movie that man is making.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  This is it.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  He's making 110% movie.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  He is all in.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he refers to it as a film, not a movie.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yes. It's a film. My thoughts after watching it are, um, uh, let's see.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  You're choosing your words so carefully.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  It was such a commitment. I am tired. I am tired. I appreciate all the special effects. Oh my God. The way they made some of this, we'll get to it. I really appreciate what the crew did. I really do.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  And at the same time, I don't ever need to see this again, ever. But I would listen to that DVD commentary again.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  I'm jealous you listened to it. I want to hear it because I'm gonna play a little section of it later that I found.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And it really made me want to hear the whole thing.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  I have six clips of it.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Great.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  And I will also share in stories for anyone who wants to listen to it.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Well, listen, why don't we take a break? And then when we come back, we are going to break down Armageddon.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  All right, we are back.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  It's time to break down Armageddon. This movie is going to open with a menacing voice.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Well, we open in outer space.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  We see the Earth.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Something is hurtling toward it. We find out that we're back in dinosaur times. And this meteor hit the Earth back then.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  And you heard us earlier in this podcast recreate this opening narration that was originally done by Charlton Heston.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  One of my favorite things is the Chiron that comes up on the screen. I laughed out loud that it says 65 million years later.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, here's the thing. They have to do that for the 13 year olds watching, right? It's like, cut to 65 million years later.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  We're not in dinosaur times anymore. I did love that when the letters of the movie come up, then they all blow apart.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Because everything in this movie is going to explode eventually, including the title of the movie.

• 22:35Speaker 06

  And if you pay attention, it's right after they say, "A Michael Bay movie." It explodes. There's an immediate explosion.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  It's perfect. We got this guy Pete. He's an astronaut. He's outside of the spaceship. He's tethered by one of those like cords.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's fixing a satellite in space.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what he's doing. Billy Bob Thornton's back at Mission Control. And he's like, "I'll give you a buffalo nickel if you just calm down a little bit. Can you do that for me?"

• 23:02Speaker 01

  His heart is racing in space. They're monitoring him.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And he's like, "Hey buddy, we got plenty of time, so don't you worry."

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  That's it. This guy's a goner.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  If someone says, "Don't you worry," you better get the hell out of there.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Did you notice Pete's blue eyes?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  I was like, "Is this Josh Lucas? Is this a young Josh Lucas?"

• 23:24Speaker 00

  I thought the same thing!

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I looked it up. It's not.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  I did too. It's not.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  It's a stunt actor named Ian Quinn.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  With the most beautiful blue eyes.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Gorgeous.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Gorgeous.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  He's gonna get hit by something falling from the sky. They don't know what at first, but all this [BLEEP] starts raining down. We're 45 seconds into the movie. Things are already exploding.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  The shuttle explodes.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  And then the satellite explodes.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  All of it.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Pete explodes.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Down on Earth, the military thinks these are bogies. They could be getting attacked. I'm sorry, I'm calling bullshit. We're getting attacked from space?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Well, this is what they say. They said, "Is it missiles? Is it an internal malfunction? Is it a glitch? Is it a wild card?" They create little pods of people for all of these different scenarios. Figure out what it is.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  I have a clip from the DVD commentary I want to play for you guys about this opening number.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Opening number?

• 24:18Speaker 00

  What do you call it? Opening sequence?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Scene. Michael Bay said he hired a young writer to do a rewrite. He doesn't say the name of the person. He says this young guy rewrote 53 pages in two days. And then Bay read the new script, and I quote, Michael Bay said, "It was pure [BLEEP]." He then gave the young writer this note, and I quote again, "In the opening, you have to grab the audience by the balls." So this sent the writer back to work. How do I grab them by the balls? And he came up with this. This idea that this whole thing goes kablooey right away.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Well, now we're gonna cut to Carl. He's a man. He's sitting inside of, I don't know, a grain silo. He's looking up at the sky with a telescope.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  He's got a homemade telescope, guys.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  He was played by John Mahon. And his wife, Dottie, played by Grace Zabritzky, is gonna throw the door open, and she's really mad because he hasn't come in for dinner.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  I mean, his Stouffer's pot pie sat on the table for 10 hours.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  She wants a divorce.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  She's pissed.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  This character of Dottie is gonna set the tone for all women in this film. If you are a woman in this film, you are either a shrew wife, a stripper, a [BLEEP] with no sense of humor, or Liv Tyler. These are the four categories of woman in this film.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Well done. Good breakdown.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'd also like to say that the fact that Carl is featured so heavily in the beginning of this movie is going to give you the impression that he's going to be some sort of central character, but he's actually gonna disappear forever after just a few scenes.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, we don't see him again. But he does get to name the asteroid, because I guess the first person that sees it and clocks it gets to name it.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  He calls NASA and tells them about it.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  He tells Billy Bob Thornton, "I want to name her Dottie after my wife." And then his wife was like, "Aww." And then he says, "'Cause she's a vicious, life-sucking [BLEEP] from which there's no escape."

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  So, there's that.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  All right, back at Command Center, everyone. It's DEFCON 3. Remember the DEFCONs?

• 26:20Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, Billy Bob Thornton is like, "You're gonna wake up 11,000 people? Let's get going."

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to remind you what DEFCON 3 means.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Oh, Michael Scott would be so excited.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yes, DEFCON 3 means "An increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness." It means the Air Force is ready to mobilize in 15 minutes. In America's history, we have been at DEFCON 3 on only a few occasions. One during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and during the September 11th attack. Incidentally, in movies, we have reached DEFCON 3 in Crimson Tide and Independence Day. And also War Games.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  We reached all the DEFCONs and War Games.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  War Games. So stressful, that movie.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  We are now gonna cut to New York City. You guys, there's a guy riding his bicycle. He's got a dog. They're making their way through the city.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yes, this is a bike messenger played by Eddie Griffin.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Per Michael Bay, this scene, he gave a nod to the movie Godzilla. Did you catch it, guys?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Is it because Eddie Griffin's dog is gonna bite some little Godzilla toys?

• 27:33Speaker 00

  There's a guy selling some Godzilla dolls on the sidewalk at 6 minutes and 33 seconds. Michael Bay wants you to know that dog was trained special to do that. It cost him $20,000 to ship that dog to set. And quote from Michael Bay, "He really did rip the [BLEEP] out of those dolls." So.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Well, we're not sure what's happening here. We're just getting a little slice of life on the streets of New York City. And then, holy [BLEEP]. Tons of what we still don't quite know what start raining down from the sky hitting Manhattan. I wrote, "This is literally insane, insane. This opening is insane."

• 28:15Speaker 00

  This New York scene, where I guess parts of the asteroid are pouring down on them, was done so well, I actually want to play a clip from the DVD of Michael Bay talking about how they did it.

• 28:27Speaker 06

  These effects right here were on car flippers, and we had TVs that were shooting through the window at high rates of speed. And this was basically being a kid in a candy store, deciding you can flip and blow up whatever you want. And we had to come up with ideas how to do things in daylight, which is very tricky in effects-driven movies, because you've got to be very critical on your effects. A lot of effects movies are done at night, where it's easier to disguise things. We had small basketball-sized space rocks coming in. It wouldn't just blow and throw a car. It would level city blocks. That's how fast these things come in, at 30,000 miles an hour. Here in the Grand Central Station, I had Rob Legato, who did Titanic, do these shots.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  This was a model that was 16 feet wide. And there were photographs of Grand Central Station with green screen people. And there were a lot of very dangerous stunts done here. And these are people around flying cars. And we invented a flipper system that was quite accurate. And I was able to put people in very close proximity to these cars. And we shot this New York sequence literally in four days. And that's quite a bit of shooting.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Well, this scene won the MTV Movie Award for Best Action Sequence.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  I believe it.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Well deserved.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Well deserved.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  So now in the movie, we know what is going on. It's a meteor shower. But is it over? Quote from NASA, "We have 11,000 people at NASA trying to figure that out."

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. I do have a background catch for us. At 10 minutes and 26 seconds, Michael Bay put himself in the movie.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  I saw it.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  I know. It was one of the guys.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  He's trying to figure it out.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  He's one of the NASA employees. Interestingly enough, though, here's what he had to say about visiting the real-life NASA Space Center. Let's hear it.

• 30:20Speaker 06

  In meeting with the people at NASA, I realized that they're simple guys. They're extremely smart. They're very Americana guys. NASA's not slick in any way. I mean, basically, it smells like the tubes from your mom's old TV set she had in the 50s. And I'm dead serious. The old Mission Control is the most unsexy place you've ever seen. And you cannot believe that they actually landed a guy on the moon there. What I tried to do with NASA was to sexy it up, to think the best and the brightest are gonna be at this facility. And in reality, they do have the best and the brightest, but the equipment is, seems antiquated. But the best and the brightest look very much like Billy Bob. I mean, these are the people that I met at NASA. And they're mathematicians, they're scientists, they're slight. I mean, the astronauts you saw, they're not studly. They're little guys.

• 31:05Speaker 06

  You know, they're not the guys you saw in the movie The Right Stuff. Astronauts are just, they're scientists.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Astronauts are scientists.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  I wish that was the tag of this movie. I wish the poster said Armageddon. We made NASA sexy.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  I mean, you guys, I have been holding on to that. That's not the last time he's gonna mention the unsexiness of us.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, I have to listen to this whole thing.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  You really do. It is worth it.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Can we go on a road trip and just listen to it together, please?

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Okay, well, here is what we're going to find out, finally. This is a quote. This is an asteroid the size of Texas. It's a global killer.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  The end of mankind. It doesn't matter where it hits. Nothing will survive, not even bacteria. We have 18 days before it hits Earth.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  All right, guys. [BLEEP] just got real.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  So now we're gonna meet the actual cast of this movie. Forget about bike messenger guy and his dog. Forget about Carl and Dottie. You're never gonna see them again. We're gonna cut to an oil rig in the South China Sea where we meet Bruce Willis, AKA Harry Stamper, and he's playing golf. He's hitting golf balls off a rig at the Greenpeace boat.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Who's protesting the rig.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  We also meet Ben Affleck, who's AJ. He works on the rig.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's gone rogue, right?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, can't find him.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Well, he did something with number two, whatever that is.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Pump number two. He turned it on when he wasn't supposed to.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  That's right. And Bruce Willis is now pissed and looking for him.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Guess what? He's been working on this rig for five years. When is Bruce Willis gonna trust his gut? You know, AJ has a gut, and he thinks that pump number two is fine.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  And they get in a little argument about it, and this is when Bruce Willis discovers that his daughter, played by Liv Tyler, is sleeping with AJ. She's in his bed.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he is not happy about that.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  So he's gonna get a gun.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And he is going to start firing a gun on an oil rig.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  This is like a big gun. It's like a shotgun.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Is this safe? This feels unsafe for so very many reasons.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Well, I can tell you, as I watched this movie with my dad, who's a drilling engineer, this was the first moment in the movie that he turned to me and he said, "Never happen. Never gonna happen."

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Right?

• 33:30Speaker 00

  He called BS on it. I found an article on Mel Magazine dot com where they had three drilling engineers fact-checked this movie. Let me tell you, they shared my dad's sentiment. One of them said, "No way would you fire a gun on a rig. It would ricochet off of everything."

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  It did do that in the movie. I mean, there was a lot of ricochet.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  A lot of ricochet. Something ricochets into Ben Affleck's leg.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  And this whole thing is stopped because a helicopter approaches.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  There's a lot of father-daughter tension, a lot of arguing. Grace is saying that it's her life. She can date who she likes.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Ben Affleck said, "You know why we had a helicopter in this movie?"

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Why?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Because we just wanted to show everyone that we're a big movie that had a ton of money. He said it was loud. You couldn't hear your lines, but they had to have a helicopter.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are the people who are financing this oil drill, and they're gonna give them a little tour. Liv Tyler clearly has some role in this business, family business. Her dad's rig.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  She's like the sort of marketing PR person. Like, "Look, this is what you're spending your money on." She's now in a nice black dress. She's in high heels on a rig.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Right?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she's showing off everything that's happening. But we're also gonna cut to a lot of problem-solving meetings over at NASA. And they're trying to figure out, "How are we gonna stop this giant meteor?" And there's this great scene where they explain, "Oh, we should just have a nuclear bomb go off. Just shoot a nuclear bomb at it." And the guy is like, "No. You have to drill a bomb into the middle, because imagine if you held a firecracker in your open hand and it went off. It would burn your hand. But if you close your fist around the firecracker and it goes off, it'll blow your hand off."

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  So this is what they have to do. They have to drill.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  A hole and then put a nuclear bomb in the hole of the asteroid.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  We're gonna cut to the rig now. Something is wrong. They are blowing oil, mud, and gas all over the rig. My dad turned to me and said, "That would never happen." He called bullshit. I'm doing such a bad impression of my dad, but he would say, "Never happen." According to the drilling engineers that fact-checked this, quote one said, "That's one of the things where the physics doesn't make sense. He just goes over there with a big crescent wrench and turns the valve by the standpipe. It makes absolutely no sense. That's not how it works. You secure a well from the rig floor. You don't secure it from the corner of the derrick." But also, they all just went on and on and said, "There's so many safety measures now, and it's very slim that anything like that would happen."

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Well, for the plot, I guess this had to happen because it proves that AJ's gut was wrong about drill number two.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Right. Now, you guys, another helicopter's gonna come. This time, it's General Montgomery.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  And he's gonna say, "You've gotta come with me. It's a matter of urgent national security." Harry's like, "Did Crazy Willie put you up to this?" And the general's like, "I'm afraid I don't know who Crazy Willie is, sir. I'm dead serious." And then I think this is when Steve Buscemi's character gets the Creeper Award.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, he gets to make a weird underage sex joke.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  He comes up to Bruce Willis when he sees the helicopter, and he says, "I swear, I didn't know how old she was."

• 36:50Speaker 00

  This is gonna be the beginning of the Creeper Runner. That is Steve Buscemi's character.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  And Harry's like, "Fine, I'll go, but I wanna take my daughter," because he's wanting to get her away from AJ.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they arrive in Houston. Harry Stamper meets Dan Truman, and after a kind of rough hello, they go inside and they bring Harry up to speed. If you are wondering why the entire world is not in a massive panic right now, it's because they're gonna tell us. There are only nine telescopes in the world that can see this asteroid, and the US controls eight of them.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  So they're able to keep this a secret from the whole world, even though most of New York City has been destroyed by a meteor shower. No one's looking up in the sky except for us.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  That's right. Bruce Willis has maybe one of my favorite lines in the movie. He says, "Six billion people on the planet. Why'd you guys call me?"

• 37:47Speaker 04

  By the way, in terms of people looking up at the sky, I Googled how far, because the asteroid's the size of Texas, hypothetically NASA would know about that decades to centuries before impact, not 18 days.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Also, now, since the scene is back in the NASA Space Center, Michael Bay had more to say about NASA and its building. Let's hear it.

• 38:07Speaker 06

  At NASA here, we tried to sexy it up. This is not a building. This is actually, this building sells herbal products. If you saw the real NASA, you just wouldn't trust it as far as you can throw it. It looks very much like an old 60s, 50s kind of school. I was very unimpressed when I went to NASA, just in terms of just the look and the lack of design. But I was also very impressed with just the intelligent people that I met there and the systems that they're doing. So we tried to give NASA a look in our mission control that was stately. I was creating a NASA that would, what would my perception of NASA be?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  You guys, I'm telling you, could you not listen to that all day?

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, and look, I'm not kink-shaming. I know there's a kink out there for everybody. This is the first time I've ever seen anybody be horny for NASA, just as the building itself.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Well, not the original building.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  So now they're gonna take Harry down to this airplane hangar, and they're gonna show him this drill. It's a drill that they stole from him. His plans that were patented, they stole it from him eight months ago for a Mars project, and it's not working right, and they need him to fix it so that they can take it into space so they can drill into this asteroid. And they have these eight astronauts that they've been training to use the drill, and they're messing it up. And this leads to Ben Affleck's famous DVD commentary about this scene. Let's hear it.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the [BLEEP] up. So that was the end of that talk. He was like, "You know, Ben, just shut up, okay? You know, this is a real plan, all right?" I was like, "You mean it's a real plan at NASA to train oil drillers?" He was like, "Just shut your mouth."

• 40:03Speaker 05

  See, here's where we demonstrate that, because Bruce is gonna tell the guys that they did a bad job of building the drill tank. He did a piss. See, he's a salt-of-the-earth guy. And the NASA nerdonauts don't, uh, don't understand his salt-of-the-earth ways, his rough-and-tumble ways.

• 40:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right. Well, that's because your cans are all.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  Like, somehow they can build rocket ships, but they don't understand, like, what makes a good tranny.

• 40:30Speaker 06

  We've had them training for eight months solid now. Eight hole months? Well, pretty much, yeah. Gee, weird.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  Like, eight hole months, as if that's not enough time to learn how to drill a hole. But in a week, we're gonna learn how to be astronauts.

• 40:44Speaker 06

  Uh, one whole week? Now you know how to fly into space? I need my guys.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  Why do you need them? They're the best. Everyone's the best. Why are they the best? I don't know. They just are. I'm only the best because I work with the best. If you don't trust the men you're working with, you're as good as dead.

• 41:01Speaker 05

  You want to send these boys into space? Fine. Sure, they'll make good astronauts. They don't know jack about drilling. I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch, let's face it. They don't know jack about drilling. How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on. You think it's just drilling a hole? There's a lot you gotta know about. And when you're gonna break, snap off an edge in a tranny on a corner of a hot pipe? And you're gonna get a gas pocket? Like, yeah, well, what about when the booster rockets don't fire? And your EVA suit and your zero gravity, you know? Didn't you see a? Didn't you see Apollo 13, boy?

• 41:38Speaker 00

  You guys, this commentary is one of the best things I've heard in a long time.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  I do want to say something, though. I want to say I completely agreed with Ben Affleck's take in this moment. But when they got up there and they were drilling that hole, I did feel like they needed some drilling experts.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Well, the drilling engineers that were interviewed for that article, they were proposed this question. Would it be easier to take an astronaut and train him to be a drilling engineer? Or get the drilling engineers out into space? Because they, listen, they didn't have to fly.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  No, they had pilots.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  They were passengers.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  We're gonna meet them.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they were all like, no, it's just, you've got to know so much about, like, geology and like, all the pressure and all of that. And it takes years and years.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  I think they were right to take the drilling engineers up into space. Ultimately, I do.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  I mean, they didn't have to learn how to be astronauts. They just had to learn to like,

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Get to space.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Get to space.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Bruce Willis is like, he's gonna do it, but he needs his own men. He needs real drillers. So now we have our let's assemble the team montage.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Boy, you guys, these drilling engineers, they're all over the place. They're riding motorcycles, they're getting tattoos. One of them's being creepy in a bar. One's on horseback, one's bedding in Vegas. And AJ, we find, has started his own drilling business.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  It's so sad looking. It has like a wooden sign that he's spray painted like AJ's drilling on it. It looks like a homemade lemonade stand.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Jenna, I gotta ask, is this the scene that turned the movie around for you?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  No, it was actually the scene before. It was the scene of Bruce Willis being like, I'll do it. I was like, I'm in.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  This is the moment I found myself enjoying the movie, like smiling and realizing I had no longer hated it. The montage.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  The assembling the crew montage.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Who doesn't love a good montage?

• 43:33Speaker 05

  This one, though, is like, I was still very unclear about what the people could do. They're like, this guy's the best.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  The thing is, we don't need to know what they're the best at.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  We don't need Owen Wilson at all.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  They're just the best.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Andy Zero times.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yes, this is when we introduce Owen Wilson. And it's never clear to me what he's good at. Steve Buscemi, we come to find out, is some sort of genius.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  He is a genius.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  He taught at MIT.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  He has multiple doctorates. And he's very useful when they get out there.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  And the big guy getting the tattoo operates the drill at the end. So he's relevant.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Owen Wilson is just funny sidekick material. But Harry is gonna gather them all in the new sexy NASA conference room. You guys, this scene was Bruce Willis's first day of filming.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  He joined them a month into filming. And he tells them about the asteroid. And then he has this amazing line that they shared on the DVD commentary was improvised.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  What was it?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  He says, "The United States government just asked us to save the world. Anybody want to say no?"

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good line.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  I know.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Way to go, Bruce Willis. Well, they all agree to do it, but they do have some requests.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  They do. Michael Bay said he had the actors write things down that they would want as their characters. And then Bruce read them off the pages. So there was some improv here. Michael Bay came up with the line about the no taxes. They'll never have to pay taxes again.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  I thought that was a really smart request.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Yes, he said that got a really big cheers in the movie screenings he went to. No one wants to pay taxes.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  One of the guys has 56 parking tickets that he would like resolved. Another person wants them to bring back eight-track tapes. Chick, the gambling guy, would like a full week's emperor's package to Caesar's Palace in Vegas. Bear wants to stay at the White House in the Lincoln Bedroom for the whole summer. Interesting. Well, now it's time for another montage. This movie is really montages and explosions and screaming. And this is their medical psychological exam montage.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  What is happening in this? What is happening? They're all in hospital gowns.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Someone brings a big giant syringe with yellow liquid.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  What is that for?

• 45:50Speaker 00

  What is that for? Some of them have bags with IVs. Some look like they're getting, is that like an anal probe?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  What?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I know.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Then they dance. And then they [BLEEP] around with the hospital equipment.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  The doctor doing the anal probe is the only woman in this whole movie that has a sense of humor.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Also, this is one of the three mini deep dives I did. I was fascinated. I was like, why do they all get enemas? And it's a real thing. Many astronauts receive pre-launched enemas to clear their bowels before.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  So they don't shit themselves?

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Oh, well, there you go. There is a psychiatrist who does some type of ink blot test and a Rubik's Cube thing.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I watched this part of the movie with Lee, he said, I can't believe this is still going on. He said this was unnecessarily long.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  This sequence.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  At the end, the doctor says, they failed. Sorry. They failed all of the tests. None of them are suitable. Billy Bob Thornton says, "All I need to know is that they can physically survive a trip to space." So his bar is very low. The doctor says, quote, "Personally, I don't know how they survived the tests." But he does approve them.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  He does. Now, you guys, we get to see the space shuttle. And there's this whole simulation in the swimming pool in like the space suits. I mean, it's pretty amazing what they were able to do. Michael Bay talks about it. They actually shot in the NASA weightless simulation tank that you see in the scene.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  So they shot in the actual pool?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yes. And the suit that Ben Affleck's wearing that they shot in was a million dollars. And later, when we get to the actual launch, they were able to have access there and shoot as well. Pretty amazing.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Wow. Well, there's a couple of things we learn, by the way, in this scene. First of all, this is a brand-new shuttle. And it has a special armor on it, everybody. And it's new. And this is why later, when this shuttle is being pummeled by various things in space and it's not breaking, it's because it's special. Okay? The main pilot is played by William Fitchner. And his co-pilot is a female pilot who was played by Jessica Steen. She is the only woman, besides Liv Tyler, in this movie in a major role. And in her main scene where she speaks,

• 48:21Speaker 01

  she's trying to describe crucial information about their space suits. But behind her back, they're basically just snickering and talking about how she's hot.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  They're not really listening to her.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  She does call them out, though. She is like, hey, I'm trying to keep you alive here.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  [BLEEP] holes.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, this whole scene reminded me of an interview that I once saw with the very first female mission control officer, Frances. Her nickname was Poppy Northcutt. She joined NASA's mission control in 1968 at the age of 25. She's a [BLEEP] badass. She was a mathematical analyst. And she helped to plot the return-to-Earth trajectory software that brings astronauts back from the moon.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  She first worked on the Apollo 8 mission. She was also in mission control during the Apollo 13 emergency. Her team figured out how to bring the astronauts home. They were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award. So I would really love for you to hear this interview with her. This is an interview from 1968, after she started working at NASA. This extremely intelligent, accomplished woman. This is what the interviewer asked her. How much problem does a woman have working in a dominantly male environment like mission control?

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Has any problems.

• 49:49Speaker 05

  How much attention do men pay to a pretty girl in a miniskirt working in their midst?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Ah. Not much. They're too busy with their consoles.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are the two questions that this interviewer asked her.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  I'm glad he asked the NASA astronaut about a miniskirt. Are you kidding me?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  This woman is rad. So I got completely fascinated and I read a bunch about her. And one of the things that she also talked about was that the pay grade was so different for men versus women.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And they wanted her to be in this very important position, but they had no category to pay a woman the salary that she would deserve.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  And so they had to create this new system just for her. And she said, this whole experience made her a feminist and made her fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and fight for equal pay for women in the workplace. She also helped to pass a law that prohibited hospitals from charging women who came in for a rape kit. And then in 1984, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Houston Law Center and became a criminal defense lawyer. Once again, her name is Poppy Northcutt and she's totally awesome.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  I mean, what a badass.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  What a total badass. All right, let's see, Ange, what is next?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Well, back now at NASA, Billy Bob's character is going to explain the flight plan to them.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I loved this scene. I loved this scene.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  He's got two little space shuttles on sticks, like the little toy space shuttles.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  And then he's got the moon and he's going to explain this lunar gravity slingshot that they're going to need to do to come around the moon and slingshot onto the asteroid, right?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Owen Wilson's character is going to speak and say, what's it like on the asteroid if we land on it? And Billy Bob's character says 200 degrees in the sunlight, minus 200 in the shade, canyons of razor sharp rock, unpredictable gravitational conditions, unexpected eruptions, things like that. And Owen Wilson says, so the scariest environment imaginable. Thanks. Got it.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Billy Bob Thornton has the two space shuttles because, guys, they're sending up two shuttles.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  With two drills and two nuclear bombs. They're going to split them up. They're going to each land on different parts of the asteroid. Whoever drills the hole first puts the nuclear bomb in and then both shuttles will fly away.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Yes, it's the freedom and the independence.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Are our two shuttles.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  I have a background catch because Harry is going to go looking for Grace and he finds Owen Wilson's character just kind of playing on the PA system.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Background catch at 45 minutes and 38 seconds. Michael Bay wants you all to know that this is the actual, very unsexy, real NASA Control Center.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  So, there you go.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Well, Harry is going to find Grace and AJ and they are sitting in a satellite?

• 52:53Speaker 00

  A thruster, a booster?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Having a wine picnic and making out.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  But not making out, lady, not making out. This scene was so cringey to me. He's behind her, right? And he's taking her dress strap down and then really sloppy kissing her shoulder.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  That's what it is. There's no make out.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  It's sloppy shoulder kissing. I do have a clip from Michael Bay I would like to play for you all. Michael Bay has talked a little bit about what Ben Affleck did to get ready for the movie. They got him a personal trainer, but there was something that wasn't taken care of and Michael Bay wanted to take care of it. Let's hear it.

• 53:32Speaker 06

  We paid for a set of $20,000 of pearly white teeth. Ben's going to hate that story. I always like low shots that kind of come right under your chin, just make you a little bit heroic. And he kind of had these baby teeth. So I told Jerry Bruckheimer, I said, God, he's got these baby teeth, Jerry. I don't know what to do.

• 53:50Speaker 06

  Jerry used a very famous star in a plane movie that he replaced teeth with. So he says, we did it to him. Why not do it to Ben? So my dentist had Ben sitting in a dentist's chair for a week, eight hours a day.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  So basically, they made Ben Affleck get veneers for this?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Because he didn't like his little baby teeth?

• 54:09Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  He wanted him to have big, shiny, white teeth.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Wait, so had they shot some of the movie with his baby teeth and some with the veneers?

• 54:18Speaker 00

  They must have. I mean, they shot a month before Bruce Willis got there. So there must have been, like, early in the movie, the baby teeth.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I wish I'd known this. I would have tried to track it. I would have looked for baby teeth versus white teeth.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  I tried to look for baby teeth. I don't see them.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  I think whatever they shot, they were like, let's pull him and get these teeth done. And there's some famous actor that Jerry Bruckheimer had do this that played a pilot.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  I'm sure we could figure that out.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  I know.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Well, listen, Harry doesn't interrupt this weird snuggle session, but he does get with all his guys. And the guys are like, listen, Harry, Grace is grown up and she's also a real hottie and we all kind of raised her and we think AJ is a great choice. But you know what? Harry did not raise her to marry a roughneck. She's better than all of them.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  She deserves better than this.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  By the way, this is now actually when they're going to go to the test site and test the armadillo underwater.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  And this is important because they've divided up into their two crews.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  And the armadillo, we should say, is this like special kind of vehicle where the wheels can rotate multiple directions. It's like an all-terrain vehicle that they're going to be able to drive with the drill and the nuke on the face of the asteroid.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And AJ is doing his test and they're like, pull back, pull back. And he's like, no, it can take it. And he blows up his drill simulation.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  And they have to get in another argument where AJ is like, why don't you trust my gut? Their simulation doesn't know what this drill can really do.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  The computer doesn't know what's real.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  So they get in a whole fight about it.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. This leads to a conversation where, you know, Bruce Willis's character, Harry, is like, maybe these guys have been working too hard. They need to blow off some steam. You know what? This might be their last night on earth. So we find out this is the final day of their training?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're blasting off tomorrow and they need a night out.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  So that they can, quote, remember what they're fighting for.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is what that montage is going to look like.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  There's the famous animal cracker scene where Grace, played by Liv Tyler and AJ, they drive a convertible BMW to a shack by a swampy field. Who lives in this shack?

• 56:49Speaker 01

  What is this location?

• 56:51Speaker 00

  There's some white lights in a tree, like twinkly lights. They don't go in the shack. They go outside of the shack with only animal crackers. I saw no water. Those crackers make me so thirsty.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and then Ben Affleck has to have his clever dialogue.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Where he says, are these really crackers? I mean, I think they're cookies because they're sweet and because you don't put cheese on them.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Well, there was a lot of improv there, so some of that.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  And then he does like sexy cracker going down her belly stuff. The song playing in the background, you know, we've talked about it, Aerosmith. So basically Liv Tyler's dad, Steve Tyler, is singing in the background of this scene.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  And then the other guys go do stuff. No surprise, Steve Buscemi's character goes to a strip club. One of them goes to see their kid.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Well, first he goes and borrows 100 grand from the mob.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Oh, right.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Which I'm confused about. I'm sorry, there's this whole thing about like, why did you become an oil driller if you're so smart? And he's like, the money's good and I like going to different places. If the money's so good, why do you have to borrow money from the mob all the time?

• 58:01Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Aren't these guys rich? I thought they were rich.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Well, listen, AJ lives in a shack by a swamp, so.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  But he has a BMW convertible. Maybe they don't make good choices.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh, the, well, the one guy you said, Angela, you started to say, chick, he is going to go visit his son who doesn't know who he is.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  But he's going to leave him a little shuttle toy.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And he's sorry that he hasn't been there for his son. And we're going to meet who I assume is his ex-wife or ex-girlfriend. We're not sure.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  She's another, just like, minor character played by a woman and she is annoyed.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Yes. Then we have this scene back at NASA between Billy Bob and Bruce and, I'm sorry, I keep saying their names. I can't remember who's who.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  I can't remember. I couldn't remember anybody's name in this movie except for Steve Buscemi's character, whose name is Rockhound.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  See, I never knew his name, but I knew Harry and AJ.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  And Grace. Okay, but anyway, we learn, okay, Michael Bay said that Billy Bob was like, I want to have something about me that's like revealed. So we find out he can't go to space because he has a leg, like, and a brace.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Right?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  He always wished he could actually be an astronaut in space.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Yes, so.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  He has a heart to heart with Bruce Willis.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  But also right now, guess what? Part of the asteroid hits Southeast Asia and 50,000 people are killed. And now the whole world knows about the asteroid.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  They can't keep it a secret anymore.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  People are panicked.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Guess what, everyone? You are over 45 minutes into the movie and you haven't left for space yet.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  No, everyone get up and go pee because we have an hour and 30 minutes more.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Maybe we should take a break and when we come back, we're going to finally launch this.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Into space.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  We're going to launch into space.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  All right, everyone, we're back. And during our break, Sam uncovered a delicious nugget to continue the conversation about Ben Affleck's teeth.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh, okay.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Ben Affleck gave an interview about it, lady. And this is also going to focus on how important it was to Michael Bay that this movie be sexy. Here is what Ben Affleck said. "Michael Bay made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy." Be sexy? How do I do that? Go to the gym, running in the gym and putting oil on my body and stuff. And it just turned out to be a long form version of one of those male topless calendars in a garage, carrying a tire kind of greased up. According to Affleck, Michael Bay had a very specific vision for the movie that included, quote, "a glistening male torso in oil." And he was like, "That's gonna go in the trailer and sell tickets."

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  I'm telling you, I think the song that runs like rent free in Michael Bay's head is, "I'm bringing sexy back."

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  What? I mean, for sure. All right, everybody, it is launch day. Don't worry, it's gonna take so long before we're finally in the air because we have some more montages.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. First, Grace and Harry have a very sweet scene where they apologize to one another. Grace is like, "Dad, I'm sorry." He's like, "Honey, I'm sorry." And she's like, "Just promise me you're gonna come back. Promise me." And he promises her.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yes. And she says, "Please bring my fiance home."

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  He's like, "You got it."

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  You got it.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  We have a slow motion montage of everyone suiting up. Then we have what I'm pretty sure is the cringiest moment of the whole movie that was really painful to watch. And it is Ben Affleck singing Leaving on a Jet Plane to Live Tyler.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  They talk about it in the DVD commentary. Basically, they were like, "This was either gonna work or it was gonna bomb."

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  It bombed. Why did they include it?

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  I think they thought it worked.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  And Michael Bay did say that they all sang different keys and it was a little tough to edit. I thought the biggest cringe, though, wasn't the song. It was when his character picks up Grace and then she tries to wrap her legs around him but can't because he's in a space suit.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  So awkward. Now, we're gonna have a president's speech. And he says, "The Bible calls this day Armageddon, the end of all things." But, you know, we're gonna fight. We're gonna come together.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  But this is the moment you hear the title of the movie. I'm always kind of a geek for that.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Like, I think it's cool if you're the character that gets to say the title of the movie.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  And there's a montage, big montage, people all over the world are listening to this.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  What year is it in this montage? Why does America look like it's 1934? Why is everyone listening to the president's speech on the radio? There's children in dresses. There's a boy in overalls and no shirt. Nobody has shoes on.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  I mean, I was waiting for like that little kid to be like, "Paul, Paul, come."

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  It's so weird.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  It's on the radio.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  It's so weird. Also, as they're suiting up, did you notice everybody, their space suit has their name? Bruce Willis says Harry. And the name they put on Steve Buscemi's space suit is Rockhound. They put his nickname, they put Rockhound on his official space suit.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  I mean, that's what NASA...

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Not his name.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  You know what? I mean, when you're bringing sexy back to NASA, this is what you do.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  I guess so.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Well, it is blast off time. Chef's kiss. I thought this was beautifully done. Michael Bay shared that he found out a month after they filmed the daytime scenes of them walking out onto the ramp and all the things, right? Which NASA gave them permission to film there. Oh, my God. That a month later, there was gonna be a night launch. He was really excited about that because it lights up so much better and looks more vibrant on the screen. So he was able to go back, I guess, and get some of that night launch.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Footage?

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Footage.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  For the launch? I had a question. Can you launch two space shuttles side by side at the same time? Is that safe?

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  I'm gonna say no because of how much it kicks up when it takes off. I feel like it would send the other one, like, spinning out.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  You're correct. It is not safe. Real shuttles could not launch side by side due to, quote, "catastrophic acoustic and debris risks."

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Well, there you go.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  But I was able to put this mission into eight steps. And I'm excited to talk about each step. Step one is blast off, and it goes great. Here's the thing about the rest of the movie. It's gonna shift pretty much every two minutes between hope or destruction. We're never gonna live in one of these two places for very long. It really is intense.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Well, here's the thing, guys. The first thing they have to do is they have to dock onto a Russian space station.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  This is step two.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  They have to refuel.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  They have to refuel. Michael Bay said that they actually talked to the astronauts on the Mir space station. And he said, "They call it, quote, 'the glove box of an old car' because everything gets lost in there. I guess it smells like leaky sewage and there's mold." And he said, "The people up there that have to live there do get a little loopy."

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Well, the Russian who is there, he seems like he's alone and he's crazy.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  He's a little crazy.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  He insists that Ben Affleck go down into this, I don't know, tube and watch the pressure gauge for the fuel.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  And if it gets to this certain number, it's bad and he's gotta hit this button.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  And then he has to pull this lever, which, guess what? Four seconds into refueling, the pressure gauge goes past 200 and everything starts sparking.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Well, Ben Affleck breaks the lever. I want to point out, our, quote, "heroes" have been on this Russian space station for not a minute and they blow it up.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Like, truly. Like, the entire station starts sparking and catching fire. But luckily, they all get back to their respective shuttles and they blast away from the space station with like seconds to spare before the whole thing explodes. There is no more space station.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  No, that's it. It's a goner.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Luckily, they let us know they got 90% of the fuel they needed.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Not all of it, but enough.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  I guess.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  I want to say that in my estimation, I really felt like step two seemed like the easiest step after blast off. Should I go through the steps? Step one was blast off. Step two is refuel at the Russian space station. Step three is enter lunar orbit and slingshot around the moon.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  At 9 Gs.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Step four is land on the asteroid. Step five is drill the hole. Step six is put the nuclear bomb inside. Step seven is fly away from the asteroid. And step eight is blow up the asteroid. So we're at step two, which was refuel, and it's already a [bleep] show. So now we're going into step three, which is slingshot around the moon.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  This is the only step that goes well, besides blast off.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  I did look up if you can survive at 9 Gs.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  I guess you can, but only for a few minutes. They are gonna be at 9 Gs for 11 minutes. One of the astronauts says, "This is what we trained for. Suck it up."

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Per Michael Bay, they shot this on a huge gimbal. It was an advanced hydraulic platform that was shaking the actors, in his words, quote, "quite violently, forwards, backwards, sideways." It was also similar to being in a car accident.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  I mean, they didn't look well

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  during this scene. I thought they looked...

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  Like they were being shaken quite violently?

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  I mean, lady, I think about how sometimes on The Office, we would do a scene and they would be like, Angela Martin whips her head and gives Kelly a mean look. And I would have to, like, eight takes in a row, whip my head, give Kelly a mean look. And I'd whip my head back. And I'd be sore.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  How do you feel after you're in a gimbal, being shaken quite violently?

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  I don't know, but you have new teeth, so.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  I guess you have that.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  You've got that.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Step four, we're at step four now. They need to land on the asteroid. Here is what I wrote. How, literally how? Because little asteroids are kind of falling off the big asteroid.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  They're flying through space. You're like flying through all of this debris to land on a moving object that's all jaggedy.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  I wondered, can space shuttles really fly like this? Because they're flying these two space shuttles like they're the Millennium Falcon. Guess what? The answer is no. Real space shuttles are gliders. They cannot take off or maneuver around an asteroid. They don't fly like that. But that's why we learned early in the movie that these are special. They've got special reinforcements and they can fly like all this shit.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  But guess what happens as they're trying to land on the asteroid?

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Well, they lose the Independence aircraft. That one's a goner.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Can I just say something?

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Immediately at the beginning of this movie, when they told me that they were going to be dividing into two shuttles.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  I'm thinking to myself, dear God, let me be on the one.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  With Bruce Willis?

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Because we know the other one is going down.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  But AJ's on the other one. Ben Affleck's on the other one.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  He is, and it goes down. One of my favorite moments is that as the asteroid hits the Independence, we cut back to NASA and you see Billy Bob Thornton's coffee mug drop, and it hits the side of the table and it breaks.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Oh, I missed that.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  So there's tragedy all around, okay? Even back at NASA, things are breaking.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:10:47Speaker 04

  I'm surprised it doesn't burst into flames.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like that it didn't like spill onto the control center. Yeah, same. All right, I want you to know what I wrote down during this scene. Here's what I wrote. How did they imagine it was ever possible to land on this asteroid? Oh, my God, they're hit again. Now astronauts are being sucked out of the windows. But wait, are some of them escaping? Oh, shit, I think Owen Wilson just died. Bruce Willis's ship is now getting hit with debris from the other shuttles. And Bruce Willis says, quote, what is that? Is that the Independence? And right after that, an astronaut is hurled into his window.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Mm hmm, yeah.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  So, yes, the Independence has crashed onto the surface of the asteroid, but I think Ben Affleck is still alive.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  Well, we find out. We find out that Ben Affleck, so AJ, Bear, and the Russian, they made it somehow.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  But back at Houston, it's assumed they're all dead.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Nobody knows that.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  There's some montages back in Houston of like worried sad people.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  But now Bruce Willis's team, they get out that big buggy thing, you know, the armadillo. They land.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  But they overshot their landing field, lady. They overshot it. I was like, there's a landing field?

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  By 26 miles.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  I mean, my God.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  They didn't even know what the asteroid looked like up close. How do they know there's a landing field?

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  I don't know, but also now their communication system is not going well.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  And they've also landed on mostly iron rock, which as we all know at this point is horrible to drill in. Iron rock.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Can't drill through it.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  So now we're going to start on step five, which is drilling the hole, and they have eight hours.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Eight hours, they have to get 800 feet. Guess what? They break their first drill bit in 10 feet.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, they do. Here was another question that I had, which was, how are they walking on the asteroid? How is this rover thing staying stuck to the surface of the asteroid? Why is it not floating away? Why is there gravity on the asteroid? I looked it up. There would not be gravity on the asteroid. Again, early in the movie, we have this little moment where they explain that their suits, remember when they're not paying attention to the woman? She's explaining that their suits have special little thrusters that will keep them stuck to the asteroid.

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  But no one is using the thrusters.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  No one's using them. You never see evidence of these thrusters.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  It's very strange. Neil deGrasse Tyson said that until the release of the 2022 film Moonfall, Armageddon was the movie which violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever. And NASA shows this film during their management training program, and new managers are given the task of trying to spot as many errors as possible. So far, they've spotted at least 168.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  So NASA uses this movie the way Human Resources uses an episode of The Office.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  Of how not to behave at the office.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yes, and this is, can you tell me everything that's wrong from a scientific point of view? And one of the things is that there would not be gravity on this asteroid.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Right, I guess there was a moment where they had to kind of pretend like they were spacewalking. Then Michael Bay was like really perturbed at Ben Affleck because he was like, didn't you learn this in acting school? Because I guess he was really bad at it, at faking it. And he was like, no, Michael Bay, I didn't learn like floating clown walking, like, you know.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  Anyway, oh, my gosh.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Wow. All right, so now the three remaining members of the Independence, they're going to get into their armadillo. They're going to shoot through the wall of their shuttle. They're going to bust out.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Shoot through their wall.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  AJ has like a, I don't know, like a Gatling gun.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Why, why did they bring this?

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  I don't know. And he just goes, and he just blows a hole through the side of the shuttle. Now they're driving onto the asteroid.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Where do they think they're going? They've decided to try to find the freedom.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  He said he has a tracker. He's.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Oh, I missed that.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Tracking him to the Freedom. They can't talk to Houston, but his tracker works.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Freedom doesn't know. I guess they're not looking at their tracker.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, they don't know, so now they're on the way. You guys, at the same time, lunar gravity is making the asteroid start to spin, and Houston is not going to have any communication with them.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the asteroid is going to hit the Earth in now about six and a half hours, but they're going to lose contact with them in the next seven minutes. If they lose the ability to communicate, they lose the ability to remotely detonate the nuclear bomb.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  And this is going to send us into, ready?

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  For my dramatic delivery?

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Secondary protocol.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Harry and the pilot of the Freedom are arguing. The pilot wants an update. You've been drilling for two and a half hours. You're supposed to be reaching 800 feet. You should be 200 feet by now. How far are you? And Harry's like, my current depth is 57 feet.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  They're not going to get it done in time.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the president has to decide, do you want to remote detonate the bomb? In the next five minutes? It doesn't matter, they haven't drilled a hole. I don't think the hole is going to happen. Should you just blow them all up on this asteroid and hope that it does something to the asteroid?

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  So, Angela Kinsey, survival guide tip.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  If they send you out there, they're going to have plans to blow it up no matter what.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  A one-way mission, okay? Don't get on the shuttle.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Well, one of my favorite things about this is that no sooner does the military guy on the phone with the president hang up. The president says, do it. Blow it up.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  No sooner does he hang up, the elevator door dings, and 50 military men walk into the Houston Command Center.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, their secondary protocol, they're taking over.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Where were they? Were they in the lobby waiting? Were they, is, like, these guys got there so fast to take over.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And meanwhile, Billy Bob's character is being sneaky, and he grabs one of the NASA dudes, one of the very unsexy NASA guys. And he says, kill the uplink.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  Kill the uplink.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  The military guys take over and they turn on the bomb. It's ticking down.

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so now you see this guy, he's flipping through a binder, he's reading some code, he's punching stuff in, the sneaky, sneaky punching in.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. Through this whole bomb ticking thing, the pilot and Harry, and I started calling him Dad Guy, the guy with the kid back on Earth.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Okay, they're all fighting.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Harry grabs a giant wrench, like a wrench, but like the size of an arm. The pilot pulls out a gun. Harry says, you're going to have to shoot me or turn off this bomb. Harry's got his giant wrench, the pilot has the bomb. It's a total standoff, and suddenly the bomb stops ticking because Billy Bob Thornton's unsexy NASA guy turned it off.

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  He stopped the uplink.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  So Harry takes this opportunity to hit the pilot with the giant wrench, and then he puts the wrench around the pilot's neck. Dad Guy grabs the gun.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  That's a big wrench.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  It's so big. And here's the thing, Billy Bob Thornton only bought them a few minutes because while they're still arguing, the bomb starts ticking again, and Harry begs the pilot to turn off the bomb. He's like, you need to trust me. Here's the audio clip.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  For God's sakes, think about what you're doing. Why are you listening to someone that's 100,000 miles away? We are here. Nobody down there can help us. If we don't get this job done.

• 1:19:18Speaker 05

  Everybody's gone. One minute.

• 1:19:21Speaker 05

  I have been drilling holes in the earth for 30 years. And I have never, never missed a depth that I have aimed for. And by God, I am not gonna miss this one. I will make 800 feet. 42 seconds.

• 1:19:35Speaker 05

  But I can't do it alone, Colonel. I need your help. You swore on your daughter's life, on my family's, that you can hit that mark. I will make 800 feet. I swear to God, I will. And let's turn this bomb off.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the big speech.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  It has one of my favorite lines in it. You know, when he's like, I have never, never missed a depth that I have aimed for. And by God, I'm not gonna miss this one. I mean, so good. And then, you guys, this starts a whole, super stressful deprogramming of the bomb. It's like, do I cut the red wire or the blue wire?

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  Red or blue, red or blue? And then, thank God, they cut the right one and...

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  It was blue.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  It was blue.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  They stopped the bomb with 2 minutes and 46 seconds left to spare.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  And they get enough radio reception for Bruce Willis to tell Houston that, basically, go fuck themselves, they've got a hole to drill.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Oh, he's got a classic. He says, now, I don't know what you people are doing down there, but we got a hole to dig up here.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I know this is probably not the takeaway they were hoping for in this moment, but it's very ironic to me because what I wrote in my document is Bruce Willis has kind of crooked teeth.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  But they're very white. But clearly, maybe they just made Bruce Willis white in his teeth, but he didn't get veneers for this.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  He didn't. He only has one that bucks out a little. I think Ben Affleck had, like, ferret teeth or something. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  I mean, I mean, no shade. My teeth are crooked on the bottom. I mean, I'm never gonna be in a Michael Bay movies. Oh, I don't have to worry about it.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Well, Ben Affleck was also the male lead.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  I also did write in my document, as we watch Ben Affleck and the Russian and Bear slowly make their way in this armadillo, they are so hot. They are...

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  Sweaty, sweaty, sweaty.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  So sweaty and oiled up.

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  Lather them up.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  So they really did oil him up.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, he talks about it in the commentary. I just need to say, too, you know, because there's still a lot of movie left, to fast track this, A.J., the bear and the Russian, they come up on a giant, like, Grand Canyon.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  But you know what? They have a fuel thruster, and they're gonna jump it, guys.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  They're gonna, you know, friggin' jump the canyon.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  But using anti-gravity. They're going to thrust up...

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  And then float over the canyon.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  But then somehow, gravity comes back.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  And you know, things go sideways, not surprising. And then the Russian guy goes outside and he's like, trying to fix the fuel thing. Now he's just hanging on to the back of it as they're like, hurtling through the canyon.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  By like, a rope.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  The, the whole thing is literally spiraling. It's running into all kinds of debris. But guess what? They land on the other side of the canyon and the Russian is alive.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  They make it. All of this is going on while Steve Buscemi's character finds the Gatlin gun on his armadillo, starts firing it, and I guess they find out he has space dementia?

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  Yes, I did a mini deep dive on this. This was the part that I needed to pause the movie.

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  I wrote down, "Space dementia?", question mark, and then Google, okay. So it's a hypothetical, it's a movie trope, based on a real thing NASA was concerned about in the 1950s, called space madness. So in the 1950s, medical experts feared space could cause severe psychological damage, impulsive behavior, or hallucinations. But they found, in reality, space missions showed that the human minds will adapt well to orbit, leaving space madness as a trope for most Hollywood and science fiction movies. And this movie was the second time, the first time it was ever referenced, was in a 1991 episode of Ren and Stimpy.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  All right. Well, he's gone mad, and he's shooting this gun. That's not the only problem, though.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Now the ground is cracking, things are exploding.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, yeah, like, these horrible gases are coming up and...

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  They lose Max.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  Max, the guy that was...

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Getting the tattoo earlier.

• 1:23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  And their whole armadillo rig.

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So now, that's it.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  They can't drill anymore. Everyone is so dejected, they're so sad, they can't complete the mission.

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  Back on Earth, they announce to everyone that the drilling was unsuccessful. They make an announcement to the world.

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Why are they telling people?

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  I don't know, but in slow motion, everyone starts preparing for the end of life as we know it.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, part of the asteroid hits Paris, and now most of Paris is gone, too.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  So then, they're like, should we evacuate these guys?

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Who are left, get them up. What? To go where? Where are they evacuating to?

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Space, to live in space for a little bit longer? Earth is gonna cease to exist in one hour.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  But Liv Tyler is like, super pissed. She's screaming at Billy Bob Thornton, "Why won't you let them evacuate?" To where, Liv Tyler? To where?

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  She's got some space dementia, too.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  I guess so, you guys. I can't believe it. I cried three times in this movie.

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Were you on a plane?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  Did you have altitude thing?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  No. No, I often do cry on movies.

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  Me, too. That's why I said, because I cry when I watch movies on the plane. All the time. Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Here's the moment. These guys, they're stuck on this asteroid, it's hurtling toward Earth, they've lost their armadillo, and up on this, like, range, you see the lights from Ben Affleck's armadillo.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  You cried, lady, you cried at that?

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  And I legit cried. I was like, what is happening? And this is when I wrote, this movie swings between hope and tragedy every two minutes. I've never seen anything like it. What's happening?

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so great.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Then I wrote, they tell Houston that we can start drilling again. Why don't they tell everyone on Earth that there's still hope? They don't tell anyone on Earth.

• 1:25:41Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  They didn't let anyone know.

• 1:25:44Speaker 00

  They didn't let anyone know. I do have a really great clip from Ben Affleck talking about working with Bruce Willis, because they're about to have this really amazing scene together. Let's hear it.

• 1:25:55Speaker 04

  Bruce was actually a really, really nice guy. He liked hanging out with everybody. He made all the actors feel comfortable. He could have been really intimidating and difficult, but instead, it was, you know, sweet. He was, he's a regular, sort of regular guy, guy's guy, and just, I had a lot of fun. He was really, really nice, you know?

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:26:14Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Well, they do reunite. They've taped up Steve Buscemi, by the way. They've taped him to a chair.

• 1:26:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, they can't risk him around, you know, weapons.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  They start drilling again. They're gonna have to go another 250 feet in one hour, and they've hit a rough spot.

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  This is just like the training exercise.

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  It is. And all of a sudden, A.J.'s like, you've gotta trust me, Harry.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  I know it can take it. Bruce Willis is screaming, "Back off, back off." And Ben Affleck is like, "I can push through it. You gotta trust me." And Bruce Willis is like, "This is our last drill bit. If this one breaks, it's not good." You know what? Bruce Willis is like, "Fine, I trust your gut."

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  So they push through it, and he was right. His gut was right, lady.

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  Right. He's oiled up, he's got a great set of teeth.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  And his gut is right.

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  And his gut is right.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is when I said, I feel like they really did need real drillers up there. I don't think astronauts could have done this.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  Well...

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  They did it. They drilled the hole.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  They did it.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  They have to put the nuclear bomb in.

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  But what they find out is, remember when the asteroid started coming apart, and there was all that mayhem? They find out that the bomb remote detonator is broken.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  The trigger is dead. They can't get on the space shuttle and fly away and detonate it? Someone has to stay behind and do it by hand.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:27:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're gonna have to draw straws.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Well, first, Bruce Willis says he'll do it.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then they're like, no way, no way.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  His men won't let him be the one. Why? Why? Why can't he be the one?

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  He volunteered. But now everybody's volunteering, except for A.J. A.J. does not volunteer.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  No, and Steve Buscemi really wants it. He's like, guys, I got this. I will do it.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Well, you can't let crazy guy do it.

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  So I agree with that.

• 1:28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  So they agree to draw straws, and A.J. gets the short straw.

• 1:28:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  So Bruce Willis says, "I'll take A.J. down, I'll get him set up." And when they get down there, he sabotages A.J.'s spacesuit.

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, he like, steps out of the airlock and then shuts him in or something? I didn't understand that.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  He like, he does something to his spacesuit that compromises it.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  And then, as A.J.'s like, gasping for air, he shoves him back into the little elevator thing that goes to the ship.

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  And it's airlocked.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  And Bruce is on the other side of it, outside on the asteroid.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  And Bruce is saying, "Take care of my little girl."

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  I cried again. I cried here as well. I cried.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Second time.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  I have an audio clip of Ben Affleck talking about shooting this scene, because he was really sick.

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 1:29:03Speaker 05

  When we shot that scene, I had food poisoning. And I wasn't an experienced enough actor at that point to know that you can just pick up the phone and be like, "I'm too sick to work today." I was like, "I better come in." And I went in, and I was literally, it's the only time I've ever had in my life, vomiting between takes. They had a garbage can. And I probably made the scene better.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  I mean, his performance is really good in that.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  I cried. I cried.

• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  I didn't cry, but I was like, I felt gutted.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  I cried.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  And then, well, here's the part that made me sad. I got a little teary because now I don't really know how he did it. But Bruce Willis's character, Harry, is able to.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  He's able to call Houston. Somehow he gets enough communication.

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  In his suit.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Somehow to call and tell his daughter he's not coming home.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  But he's in his space suit, but on the screen, he's not in a suit.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Is that right? I didn't notice that.

• 1:30:03Speaker 00

  But it's very sad.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  It's very sad. And you know what I thought? He says to her, you know, you get married, you're gonna spend your life with AJ. I thought, my God, these two can never get divorced.

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  I know. I thought that too. I thought that too. I'm like, you better stick it out.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  You can never break up with this guy.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  Never.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Your dad gave his life so you could marry him.

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Well, guess what? It's not the end of the problems. Now, step seven is take off from the asteroid.

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  And the engines won't start.

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  The female pilot and the Russian go down to try to fix the problem. She's trying to do some official things. The Russian fixes it by banging something with a wrench. And they have liftoff.

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  But the meteor is exploding randomly again.

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  But you guys, they make it.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  They do get off the thing.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  But Harry is now out of range of the detonator because of all the things that are exploding randomly. And the meteor is about to cross the threshold of the barrier where they can detonate it. Because here's the thing. If they detonate it too late, then it's gonna split in half. But the two halves are still gonna hit the earth.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was this line, they had to like detonate before they crossed this line.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  But he presses it. He had only 20 seconds left, but he presses it. The meteor splits in half. Somehow, the blast radius from this nuclear bomb does not reach the shuttle, which is still very close to it.

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  There's no way. When you see the special effect, it sent like a ginormous sonic wave through space. It just would have obliterated anything.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Shuttle.

• 1:31:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they make it.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  It's okay. We have cheers at Houston and around the world. A lot of slow motion celebration.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Again, dressed like they live on a prairie in the 1800s.

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Grace knows her dad is gone and Billy Bob Thornton hugs her.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, the line that Harry said to her that got me. Before they lost radio contact, he says, I'll look in on you from time to time. And that got me. That got me. You guys, once they land, you know, they get off the space shuttle. There's lots of hugging and like you said, right?

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  It's in slow motion.

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Grace and AJ's slow motion run to each other. Chick's son is there to greet him with a slow motion run.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  And I cried at that.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  I cried at the fact that this dad was gonna be back in his son's life.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Got me.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, and AJ gives Billy Bob's character the shuttle patch.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Yes. And oh, I also cried when Colonel Sharp wanted to shake Grace's hand because her dad was the hero. He said, I wanted to shake the hand of the daughter of the man who saved the world.

• 1:32:56Speaker 00

  It's very moving, you know? I have a clip from the DVD commentary where Bruce Willis talked about what it was like to work on this movie. Let's hear it.

• 1:33:04Speaker 07

  It was a nice change for me, working with an ensemble cast like we had in Armageddon. All really funny guys. My strongest memory of now is how much we laughed every day and just tried to keep cracking each other up.

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  So it sounds like they had a really good time.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  This movie has a tag over the credits.

• 1:33:25Speaker 00

  It does.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  AJ and Grace get married.

• 1:33:28Speaker 00

  I loved that.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  It was lovely.

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  It made me happy.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  And then the movie's over.

• 1:33:33Speaker 00

  And that's it.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  You did it. Two hours and 31 minutes.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  I have one note.

• 1:33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  I just think that during that final slow motion montage of everyone on Earth being happy that the meteor was destroyed, it would have been really nice if we could have just seen Bike Guy hugging his dog.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  And maybe Telescope Guy and his wife, Dottie, hugging or something.

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Just some resolution on those characters that we set up in the cold open of this movie.

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I agree. I would love to have seen the dog with like a Godzilla toy in his mouth, shaking it.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Something.

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  And maybe Dottie flipping off her husband, but like with a smile.

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Like, F you, we did it.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. If I had been in the room.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  I would have given that note.

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  I would, no.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  No, otherwise, otherwise.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Don't change anything.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  Don't change a thing.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Definitely keep in the leaving on a jet plane.

• 1:34:34Speaker 00

  Sam, final thoughts?

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  I love it. It's not good. I love it.

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  That's a great quote. It's not good, but I love it.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  That's how I feel.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm excited to know that they had a good time, you know? And I really look forward to the road trip you and I take where we listen to the DVD commentary.

• 1:34:53Speaker 05

  Can I add something real quick?

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  I really admire all of your work, breaking down this movie, your attention to detail. I found it so exhausting and the way you really got in there, took the whole thing seriously, looked into everything. I'm in awe. Well done.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  Aw, thanks, Matt.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  You, Matt.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  We love a movie breakdown, guys. If there's another one you think we gotta tackle, let us know. Write to us over at office ladies dot com in our general mail folder.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  And we'll see you next week.

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  See you then.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Thank you for listening to Office Ladies.

• 1:35:27Speaker 00

  Office Ladies is a presentation of Odyssey and is produced by Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Our senior producer is Matt Beagle and our audio engineer is Sam Kiefer.

• 1:35:37Speaker 00

  Odyssey's executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Office Ladies was mixed and mastered by Bill Schultz.

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  Our theme song is Rubber Tree by Creed Bratton.