Armageddon: A father's story

A day full of disasters isn’t bad at all. Well, I’m actually talking about having a disaster film marathon at home.

My interest with the genre started a couple of weeks ago after my eyes got glued on the screen of my PC at work for several minutes. I still can’t believe that the photos of the sinkhole in Guatemala which circulated in the Internet are real.

To date, I just survived the molten lavas of Pierce Brosnan’s Dante’s Peak, a scary chase with Bill Paxton’s Twister and a meteor collision in Bruce Willis’ Armageddon. Among the three, I find the last one as the best because director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer did not only focus on the special effects and scare and suspense factor of the film but he also added a little drama which was very touching and effective.

Actually, before Armageddon was shown in theaters in 1998, Deep Impact which starred Morgan Freeman and has a similar premise was released two months earlier and even got the nods of astronomers as the more scientific and accurate meteor crash movie. But it did not affect Armageddon’s box-office success as it made a splash as the highest-grossing movie of the year.

My take on this is that aside from the fact that the movie has an all-star cast (Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton), it also touched one of the most important aspect in a man’s life — interpersonal relationships.

In any type of movie, a love angle between a protagonist and his leading lady will sometimes be the center of the story. Not in Armageddon where the father-daughter tandem of Willis and Tyler became the heart of the film instead of her relationship with Affleck. I’ve never seen a film where in the end; people were touched more and would talk about the father’s great love than the story of the love team.

Some people might just remember Armageddon as a film about a group of deep-core drillers who saved the human race from a giant meteor which was about to destroy Earth. But from the very first time I saw the film, I have always believed that it is also about a father’s story who sacrificed his life for his daughter’s happiness.

What kind of father will take the place of the boyfriend of his daughter from doing a deadly task? In the movie, A.J. (Affleck) was assigned to detonate the bomb on the traveling meteor after drawing straws but Harry (Willis) disables A.J.’s air supply, pushed him away from the bomb and takes his place. Before completing the mission, Harry sends a message to his daughter, giving his full support for her to marry A.J. He then detonates the bomb, causing the meteor to split in two and miss the Earth by 400 miles, at the cost of his own life.

This part is a real tearjerker especially when the movie theme song I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing by Aerosmith started to play (Just in case you don’t know, the band’s lead vocalist Steven is Liv’s real-life father). One will feel the pain of a daughter who just lost his father along with a weird feeling of joy and admiration to a man who has shown the true meaning of a father’s love in an extraordinary way.

It’s a little surprising how a disaster film will turn out to be a moving father’s story that hopefully will inspire men to be “real” fathers to their children. For me, those who have neglected their kids for whatever reasons are the true disaster stories. I’m a father as well, that’s why I know.