Armageddon

Armageddon is a 1998 American science fiction disaster film directed by Michael Bay and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. When meteor fragments begin striking New York, NASA discovers a gigantic asteroid the size of Texas hurtling toward Earth, with a collision only eighteen days away. The agency concludes that the best hope is to send drillers into space rather than astronauts, so veteran oil driller Harry Stamper and his roughneck crew are recruited, rushed through accelerated training and flown to the asteroid aboard two shuttles. Their mission is to bore a deep hole into the rock, detonate a nuclear charge inside it and split the asteroid in two so the halves pass safely by Earth. Featuring an ensemble cast including Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton and Steve Buscemi, the film received largely negative reviews yet became the highest-grossing film worldwide of 1998. It opened the same summer as the similarly themed Deep Impact, which astronomers deemed the more scientifically accurate of the two.