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Harry Stamper: The United States Government just asked us to save the world. Anyone wanna say no?

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Mistakes

The first shuttle takes off some time before the second. Nevertheless we see a picture of both shuttles in the air shortly after they clear the towers. See more...

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The character Freddy Noonan appears in, or is referenced in many scenes yet is more or less an afterthought. This is the same name as Amelia Earhart's navigator, who was involved in one of the most famous real life aerial mysteries, but is also a largely forgotten person. See more...

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Movie Mistakes blog

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Armageddon (1998) - 70 corrections

Directed by Michael Bay, starring Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Michael Clarke Duncan, Peter Stormare, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner (add more)

Genres: Action, Romance, Sci-fi, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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Updated this week Gruber is around to help disarm the bomb but doesn't seem to be around to make the trip home. [Gruber is killed during the 'asteroid storm' shortly after the disarming of the bomb.]
Edit Corrected by XIII
Both teams have to drill an 800-foot hole in the asteroid (even though only one team made it to a drilling location). They are doing this in an area that the ground is mostly metal and they are using metal drill bits. The bits the drillers use in the movie are known as "rock bits" and will not cut through metal. There are special bits known as "milling" bits to do that. [Having to drill through the metal was an error on their behelaf. They hadn't intended to land there at all, and therefore weren't prepared for it. They had to use what they had on hand to attempt to get the job done as well as possible.]
Edit Corrected by Kimberly Mason
As they're unbuckling after the rough landing on the asteroid about 1:20:00 in, it sounds as though Steve Buscemi calls Bruce Willis by his real name and not his character's name. [He actually says " not bad " after Harry says may they rest in peace.]
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At the end of the movie there is a flyover by Air Force jets (the Thunderbirds possibly?). At the end of the flyover one jet peels off in what I believe is supposed to be the "missing man formation." However, the plane that leaves is the one in the back middle. This is incorrect, as it leaves an intact 5-plane V. Instead one of the planes to the side of the lead plane (on either side) should have left, leaving an unbalanced, "missing" formation. [Then it's obviously not the "missing man formation". These are professional pilots. What they're doing is done on purpose. They didn't just throw a few stuntmen into fighter jets and tell 'em to try to do something cool. This isn't a movie mistake.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
When they finish drilling the hole, they pull the pipes up and throw them in a pile. They fall to the 'ground' quickly. The asteroid would have virtually no gravity. [It is explained before the mission that because of the asteroid's mass and it's rotation there will be unpredictable gravity.]
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The shuttles sling-shot around the moon to gain speed. This is a manoeuvre undertaken to save fuel. Nevertheless, we see the shuttles using full after burners on the ride around the moon. [They don't have time to waste simply allowing gravity to accelerate them, so they combine a gravitational slingshot course with the full acceleration from the engines. Allows them to get up to the required speed faster and using less fuel than using the engines alone, but, given the time pressures that they face, they can't afford to shut the engines down and coast on gravitational acceleration alone.]
Edit Corrected by Tailkinker
When we see that AJ and the Russian have survived, we see a sweep through the wreckage of the shuttle. Pieces of wreckage are burning with little, earthly like flames, which are not possible without oxygen. [This is already listed as a mistake. Its the highest ranked one.]
Edit Corrected by Lummie
Just before A.J goes down the chute in the Russian space station to refuel the rockets, you can see an American flag behind him. Odd that an American flag would be on a Russian space station. [Odd, perhaps, but far from impossible. Someone has made a character decision to bring it on board, simple as that.]
Edit Corrected by Twotall
In the scene were the first crew ship collides with the asteroid after being slung around the moon, the pilot is seen crashing into the window of the other ship without "space gear", untrue as we know oxygen does not exist in space, and the fact that there is no gravity would make the body implode not just go around like normal. That is why astronauts wear suits outside the ship, very carefully designed suits that allow for them to be in that environment. [That's simply not true, the body will not "implode due to lack of gravity". If anything it would explode due to lack of pressure, but that's unlikely as well.]
Edit Corrected by SexyIrishLeprechaun
After the transmission blows on the asteroid causing Harry to be thrown about 15 feet away, in the very next shot when he is asking God for a little help, we can see that he is suddenly standing in front of the spinning drill bit head. How did he pick himself up and get back there so quickly? [This is not Harry who gets thrown back, it is Chick watch when Rockhound goes over to him look at his face.]
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When AJ is down getting the liquid O2 and they have to evacuate, fire blows up the tunnel and engulfs him as he is climbing out, yet even though his face is uncovered, he is not burned. [It's a quick flash of fire so it passed him very quickly, plus he was wearing protective clothing]
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In the scene with A.J's Armadillo, you can clearly see the shadow of one of the cameras in the smoke behind them. [This is not a camera its the big gun mounted on the side of the armadillo.]
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During the opening titles after the asteroid hits earth, the fireball spreads out around the world and the camera angle shifts across about 10% of the earth's surface, and suddenly the fireball has progressed almost completely around the entire world. It wouldn't have happened anywhere near this quickly, and its appearance would have changed as its intensity diminished. [We can safely assume that the director of the film did it this particular way to add drama to the opening sequence of the film and to add special effects so that the audience can see what once happened.]
Edit Corrected by The-Immortal Time
For the first time civilians wore genuine NASA spacesuits. They cost over 3 million dollars each. [Close, but no cigar. Christa McAuliffe, who flew on the doomed Challenger flight in 1986, was a civilian.]
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If "NASA doubles up on everything.", why didn't the nuclear bomb on Independence go off when it crashed? Colonel Sharp stops Stamper from hitting their bomb with a wrench since it would set it off, so why didn't the one on Independence detonate? [A crash wouldn't set a nuclear bomb off; it takes a very precise set of events to occur for that to happen, which a crash couldn't possibly replicate. Nor, for that matter, would hitting one with a wrench, which Sharp undoubtedly knows, but with the fate of the Earth riding on that bomb, he can't risk Stamper damaging it. The easiest way to ensure that he doesn't do it again is to tell them that it might actually go off. It's not true, but Stamper and his men aren't going to know that.]
Edit Corrected by Tailkinker
Liv Tyler's real-life dad, frontman of Aerosmith Steven Tyler, wanted to do the song "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" especially because his daughter was in the movie. [I am an Aerosmith freak and I know this is not true. I've seen 2 separate interviews by Steven Tyler and in both he said he did NOT want to record the song because it was too sappy. He only agreed after watching the ending sequence where Liv grabs the screen and says "Daddy" while she is crying. The ironic thing is the song became the first no. 1 hit Aerosmith ever had.]
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One of the things the creators of the movie did not think out is the issue of the asteroid's gravity. There are several problems with that. It is stated that the asteroid is the size of Texas. Even if we assumed it to have had 1000 miles of diameter (a really huge asteroid) and the same density as Earth it would have gravity of about 12% of Earth's gravity. In the movie it can be seen (even though stated otherwise) that the teams operate under earth-like gravity – tools, piping elements, debris all fall down with quite an acceleration. Also the astronauts move about very conveniently – much more easily than would for example on the Moon. On the other hand if we assumed that the asteroid had much higher density, which allowed it to had significant gravity, a near passing (a couple of hundred kilometers) of such a massive body alone would probably wipe out humanity just as efficiently as a direct hit. Even if we assumed that the asteroid's diameter was only 500 miles and its density was about the density of the Moon, the near passing of its two halves would wreak havoc on Earth as the influence of their gravity on, for example, ocean tides, would be up to 20 times bigger than Moon's. [The mathematicians at NASA would have taken the fragments into account and set up the "zero-barrier" sufficiently far away. This is why the earth sees no effects from them. And gravity is increased due to the asteroid spinning.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
The scene where the crew boards the twin ships and then the starting sequence strongly suggests that the shuttles are launched from pads located very close to each other. With all the air movement, heat, fumes and dust generated by the powerful engines of the spaceships it would be extremely dangerous to launch two spaceships simultaneously and so close to each other. I cannot believe NASA would ever allow that - especially with so important a mission. [Only if there were people in the immediate area, and there certainly were not. The ships would not be a danger to each other, either.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
I find it highly unlikely that all of those astronauts would have gleaming white teeth. [I'm not sure that "highly unlikely" would constitute a movie mistake. Highly unlikely still means it's possible in the context of the movie.]
Edit Corrected by Zwn Annwn
En route to the asteroid, the two space shuttles head to the Russian space station to refuel. To simulate gravity, the cosmonaut aboard the space station fires a few rockets to put the space station into the spin. How fast does it need to spin to reproduce Earth gravity? Assuming the space station's spoke arms (where the shuttles dock) are about 50 feet long, the answer is 8 revolutions a minute. That makes it impossible to dock - it'd be like trying to drive a car on ice-covered roads into a spinning parking garage. There's another, more fundamental, problem: the artificial gravity points in the wrong direction. Think of spinning rides at the amusement park. The spinning motion creates an artificial gravity, an effective outward-pushing force. On the space station, the spinning would tend to throw the astronauts down the station's spoke arms and back onto the shuttle. Also, the artificial gravity would taper off to nothing at the centre. But the movie's artificial gravity somehow points down, not outward, and appears to work equally well throughout the station. [The space station does not have to be spinning 8 RPM, as it does not need to simulate earth gravity exactly. Half a G would be more than enough to make it possible to walk around without floating. Even at 8 RPM it would not be impossible to dock. In 1975, Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked for the first time, and over 44 hours split and redocked at least twice. This was with an HP-65 handheld computer being used for calculations, with mission control as a backup. Nowadays, an average desktop computer has more computational power than what was in Apollo. The two craft were approaching each other, but had to maneuver to line themselves up and match rotation. If it could be done in 1975, it's more than possible to do it now.]
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