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All's Fair in Love and Asteroids

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Scientists had a lot to say about Armageddon on its 25th anniversary, not that it matters as those who love this movie will stand by it no matter how much the Hollywood dynamic duo of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay defy the laws of gravity and just about everything else when it comes to science.  It's just entertainment fans cry, like Transformers and all the other claptrap these guys have produced and directed.  The latest installment came out last month.

What is bothersome about Armageddon is that a lot of persons took it seriously, including Criterion which added it to its exclusive collection.  There's even an essay by Jeanine Basinger defending this "work of art."  Ms. Basinger was young Michael's mentor at Wesleyan film studies.  She praised the film for its "take-no-prisoners" form of storytelling.  A very nice way of putting it.  

However, the production team did call in scientific consultants as Steven Spielberg had for Deep Impact that was released the same year.  It's just that Bruckheimer and Bay chose to ignore them, preferring to essentially make a Die Hard movie in space with Bruce Willis at the peak of his career.

None of it would really matter if we weren't experiencing a new era in anti-science largely in response to the COVID pandemic.  In fact, you can trace back this current wave of skepticism to a report published the same year as Armageddon that made a dubious connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.  Although this report was immediately discredited, and Andrew Wakefield and his 12 collaborators were forced to retract their findings, it is still widely cited by anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Wakefield was a scientist after all and therefor lent legitimacy to the anti-vaccine movement that was gaining a considerable amount of momentum at the time.  He had supposedly tested his hypothesis with a peer review but these were carefully selected peers who would support his findings as most researchers in the field of autism considered it a genetic trait.  It's just that it isn't really visible until a child is around the age of two, shortly after most pediatricians have given the first MMR vaccine doses.  Wakefield chose to make a correlation where none existed.

Obviously Bruckheimer and Bay are no scientists but Michael staunchly defended the film, or at least made no apologies for it given the widespread criticism.  He just wished he had a little more time to edit the final act, probably because it wasn't explosive enough in retrospect.

If the premise wasn't laughable enough, a group of oil-drillers thrust into space to drill nuclear warheads into a fast-approaching asteroid the size of Texas, the last act where these roughneck astronauts actually make contact with the asteroid and plant these warheads into its apocalyptic surface just makes you roll your eyes in wonder.  Here they are scooting around the surface of the strangely shaped projectile with jet thrusters to compensate for the lack of gravity.  Critics on Reddit had a field day, noting the grass in one scene, which made it look like they filmed these scenes on the backlot of the studio.

The film appeared to have an "explicit, seemingly deliberate hostility to science baked into its very conception."  Nothing at all made sense from the enormous size of the asteroid to the idea that NASA would shuttle oil-drillers into space when it would be easier to train astronauts to drill holes, as Ben Affleck pointed out in the DVD commentary, presumably on Criterion.  In fact it would have made more sense to do away with astronauts all together and aim rockets at the asteroid as NASA recently did to see if they could alter the trajectory of these projectiles.  Not surprisingly Michael Bay had something to say about this too.

This is why scientists do not want to debate anti-science advocates.  No amount of science is going to alter views that have been reinforced by lavish productions or specious reports due to what psychologists call cognitive bias, or as Agent Mulder put it, "I want to believe."  This is true of everything from space aliens to bigfoot to holistic diets.  If you have faith you can overcome anything, whether it is COVID or the end of the world as we know it, as long as you have God by your side.  Scientists be damned!

The larger problem is how much of this anti-science rhetoric has been absorbed by the right wing of the Republican Party and has even seeped into the left wing of the Democratic Party so that now you have anti-vaxxers running as Democrats.  This despite having come through the worst pandemic in a century in which scientists rushed to produce treatments and vaccines that were able to stem COVID before it killed off a major portion of the world's population.  As it is, COVID killed 7 million persons worldwide.  If we had subscribed to the prevailing conservative theories that number would have been much much higher.  Yet, many conservatives believe they were right to defy pandemic protocols and have portrayed Dr. Anthony Fauci as a villain.  

Not surprisingly, Michael Bay had a COVID film in the works before the pandemic shut down production.  He was eventually able to get Songbird made but it was only available on demand through cable companies during the pandemic as most theaters were closed.  It too endured widespread criticism, but Michael has learned to shrug off such protests.


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