When I was a kid, some scientists still argued that the craters on the moon were volcanic. In fact, Patrick Moore, the astronomy pundit, was still arguing that as late as the end of the sixties.

The planetary exploration program put paid to that, when we discovered that Mars and Mercury (and Phobos, Deimos, various other moons of the solar system, and the two or three asteroids of which we have decent photographs) were as cratered as the moon. Of course, then the question arises: how come, if all these bodies were hit by huge numbers of big rocks, the earth wasn’t? Answer: who says it wasn’t? Most of earth’s meteoric record has, of course, been destroyed by erosion and subduction, but there’s plenty of evidence out there for those who know where to look, ranging from the scatter of target holes across the Canadian Shield to monsters like the fifty-mile Vredevoort Ring in South Africa. There have even been suggestions (never proved, to my knowledge) that James Bay in Canada and that chain of huge circular indentations along the east coast of the United States are ancient astroblemes. And, of course, there are even a few holes I myself have visited, the Odessa crater in Texas (third largest in the United States; it looks like a gravel pit) and Baringer or Meteor Crater in Arizona, at 3/4 of a mile across the largest (only 20,000 years old, it’s a classical impact crater, so far only lightly touched by erosion).

And, of course, there were the discoveries in the seventies by Luis Alvarez and others at Berkeley that led to the current model in which, more than sixty million years ago, a rock a few miles across impacted in or near what is now Yucatan and, through its global effects, ended the hundred-million-year-old Age of the Dinosaurs.

While most people throughout history never doubted that rocks could fall from the sky — the Islamic kabba is a meteor — the Age of Rationality put paid to the idea for a while; French farmers, trying to report such falls to the Academie Française in the early 19th century, were turned away as credulous buffoons by a collection of scientists who knew that such things were impossible. But eventually meteorites ⁽¹⁾ became a legitimate object of study.

Late in the sixties they became, in some circles, an object of worry. Little rocks enter the atmosphere in large numbers every day; when they are big enough and concentrated enough, they make up a nice fireworks display, though not particularly comparable to those we see on July 4. Some even get through to hit the ground, rather than burning up on atmospheric entry; given the amount of surface area (most of it water, and therefore uninhabited) on the planet, with few exceptions these are harmless. But if a big enough one were to impact at a high enough speed …

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, drawing on earlier articles in Analog (e.g. “Secondary Meteor Impacts”) and some brainstorming sessions at NASA, came up with the novel Lucifer’s Hammer in 1977 or thereabouts. Lucifer’s Hammer, which discussed both the physical and societal effects of the impact of a comet’s head on the planet, was written in a peculiar style — it was broken down into short episodes, switching between the points of view of half a dozen major characters. This was not traditional novel style, but read very much as if it was a trial balloon for a movie script.

Bad luck, guys. Before anybody could do more than option the cinema rights to Lucifer’s Hammer, the Shaw (Xiao?) brothers in Hong Kong came out with Meteor, a movie that Sean Connery probably prefers to omit from his resume. Meteor was done well enough from the technical point of view, given the special effects available at the time, but the story was eminently forgettable and the results of a major meteor impact on Manhattan were unbelievable. Meteor-impact movies got a bad name. Twenty years, it seems, is enough time for a bad name to sink into obscurity. So far this year, we’ve had two rockfall movies: Deep Impact, which was not all that bad; and now Armageddon, which is not all that great, though it obviously strove to be.

Imagine: a previously undiscovered rock “the size of Texas” is about to fall on the world, homogenizing it. How this rock remained undiscovered so long is never explained, since Vesta, the largest asteroid we know of — and we’ve known of it for almost two hundred years — is considerably smaller. How a rock this size got knocked so severely out of orbit by a passing comet — comets are not, after all, very massive — is not explained. Why the U.S. government would decide to destroy the rock by sending up a team of oil drillers is not very clear. Why the asteroid has icicles sticking up all over its surface is not at all clear. How one can accelerate at nine and a half gravities for eleven minutes and end up with a speed of twenty-two thousand miles an hour (headed back towards earth instead of shooting off into space) is totally unclear. How one armadillo can jump over a gap the size of the grand canyon because of the low gravity, while another armadillo can sit there on its tires and thrust a massive drill downwards without throwing itself backwards into space (it hasn’t grappled to the surface or anything) is simply inexplicable. And where the devil did all that fuel aboard Mir come from? Maybe the whole asteroid-impact thing was a Russian plot; that’s the only way they could possibly have been so ready for the last-minute mission to save earth. I could go on a bit longer, but life is too short. ⁽²⁾

Well, I’m not going to be totally negative. The special effects were excellent (well, most of them). The meteor bombardment of New York, with its colliding taxis and police cars (shades of Independence Day!) was not bad; the rockfall on Shanghai was poorly done, but the destruction of Paris was much better. You could sit there and cheer with the crowds when the two shuttles lifted off. The rivalry between Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and A. J. Frost (Ben Affleck) over Stamper’s willful daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) is believable, if not totally relevant to the film; though Stamper’s behavior in this rivalry is no more so than is Rockhound’s (Steve Buscemi’s) inexplicable madness.

I think this film intended to be the 1998 equivalent of Independence Day, but it lacks the chemistry of ID4, which, despite its many and evident flaws, was a film that lifted you out of your seat. But when ID4 ended, you tended to say: “What? It’s over already?” Two hours into Armageddon, you tended to shake your watch to see if it was broken. Deep Impact was, IMHO, better. I’ve also seen one reference to a similarly-themed film Galileo’s Wake, but don’t know if it will ever actually surface. If it does, maybe it’ll be the definitive rockfall film. This one wasn’t … I hope.

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⁽¹⁾ The terminology here is a bit confusing. “Meteor”, which is commonly used, technically refers to any visible aerial phenomenon, from lightning to UFOs. The rocks are usually referred to as “meteorites” or, occasionally, “aeroliths”. I prefer to call them “rocks”.

⁽²⁾ Two years after writing this review, I heard a talk by planetologist Karen Meech in which she expressed similar reservations about the science in this film …

Don Harlow, July 2, 1998 03:30 PM

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