Bruce Willis Had A Big Issue With Michael Bay’s Armageddon

On paper, the pairing of actor Bruce Willis and director Michael Bay would seem like a match made in heaven. Right from the start of his career, Bay demonstrated an affinity for casting movie stars with big personalities, and Willis was one of the biggest personalities of the ’90s. The actor’s particular brand of machismo serves Bay’s rah-rah jingoism especially well in the director’s third feature, 1998’s “Armageddon.” Who else but Willis could make a general audience buy the patently ridiculous premise that Willis’ oil drilling company head, Harry S. Stamper, and his fellow drillers could be given a crash-course in astronaut training in order to man a mission onto a “planet-killer” asteroid headed directly for Earth?

In “Armageddon,” as in many of Bay’s films, there is much that can be critiqued; even the movie’s defenders (yours truly included) admit that the premise is one that stretches the limits of even B-movie credulity, no matter how scientifically possible it may be. So while it’s not surprising that Willis has been vocally very critical about “Armageddon” in the years following the film, his beef has more to do with what’s not in the film as much as what is, with the primary issue being numerous character-building moments that Bay removed from the film’s theatrical cut. Although Willis’ complaint is well-founded, there does exist an extended director’s cut of the film that seems to fix this issue — however, you’d have to buy a decades-old Criterion Collection DVD in order to watch it.

To be clear, Willis has made a lot of complaints over the years about “Armageddon” and his experience making it. As he told The Morning Call (via Far Out) upon the film’s release in 1998, he thought that the movie was “too MTV-camera cutty” and that “Billy Bob [Thornton] was under-used,” but also talked about how the spacesuits he and the other actors wore in the film had numerous issues, with Ben Affleck apparently “seen bashing the front glass on his helmet with a rock because he couldn’t breathe” at one point. In a later interview with Ain’t it Cool News that doesn’t appear to be online anymore, Willis apparently went on to say that Bay’s unfortunate trademark screaming and shouting on set was not something he found pleasant, even though “we were all big boys and we got through it.”

It was in a cover story from 2002 in The New York Times, about a theatrical production of “True West” Willis was starring in, where the actor further elaborated on his issue with “Armageddon.” In addition to the unpleasant working conditions and Bay’s signature fast-cutting style, Willis was not pleased that so much of his and others’ work was not included in the release of the movie:

“There were so many scenes in ‘Armageddon.’ All the great acting scenes are on the cutting room floor and were sacrificed for this sort of MTV version, Michael Bay’s vision of filmmaking. That’s Michael’s choice as a filmmaker.”

All of this “MTV version” editing that Willis keeps referring to is his way of describing Bay’s signature “Bayhem” style of cutting, something which really came to fruition with “Armageddon” and has only gotten wilder and more intense in the films he’s made since. While us Bayheads see Bayhem as a feature and not a bug, Willis’ point about the theatrical cut of “Armageddon” sacrificing as much character for plot and incident is well taken. The film is so chock full of stuff that even at 150 minutes it feels rushed! Even though Willis may have other reasons for not loving “Armageddon,” the reasons he states do seem like enough for it to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

One does wonder, however, what Willis thinks about Bay’s director’s cut of the film, a version that thus far has only been available on the Criterion Collection’s long out of print DVD release of the movie. He certainly has seen some of it, as he was part of the release’s group commentary track (you know, the one that’s gained notoriety over the years thanks to Affleck’s unfiltered comments about the film). The director’s cut is only three minutes longer than the theatrical cut, but that extra time allows Bay to add back in some key lines of dialogue and extended moments between characters. Two of the most major additions are scenes involving Willis himself, one where he and Thornton’s NASA head have a heart to heart, and another where Harry visits his father (played by Lawrence Tierney) before blasting off on his fateful mission.

It’s entirely possible that these scenes were some of the ones Willis was so bummed to see lost in the theatrical cut, as both moments, brief as they are, further develop both Harry’s character and the film itself. Harry’s father even delivers a line of dialogue that perfectly encapsulates the emotional theme of the whole film: “God gave us children so we’d have roses in December.” With the thrust of “Armageddon” being about how the older generation, at their best, make sacrifices to allow for the younger generation to survive, this moment and a couple others help make the film a far more touchingly emotional experience than the theatrical cut’s all-spectacle-and-forced-heart. Who knows how much additional footage may still exist out there (Disney, if you’re indeed putting out a 4K edition, please put the director’s cut and any other materials on the disc!), but the existence of the director’s cut sure does simultaneously prove and refute Willis’ point. While it’s too bad the actor and Bay never worked together again (imagine Willis in the Cade Yeager role in “Transformers” instead of Mark Wahlberg!), we’ll always have “Armageddon.”