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With far too little time to come up with a good plan, NASA decides to go with a stupid one. They will hire the world’s snarkiest deep sea oil driller to land a team on the rock, plant a nuclear device, and blow the thing up. Estimated call for the explosion to be a great golden shower of nuclear fire, comparable only to Michael Bay’s own shimmering locks. I’ve always felt that narratively, it wasn’t necessary to make the asteroid so comically large, because any idiot can quickly do the math and see that no, even in a dumb movie like this, that wouldn’t work.

But that’s not the greatest part about this. The greatest part is the “how are they going to get to the asteroid” part. Well, NASA, the agency that minutes ago did not have enough money to see something the size of the Death Star bearing down on the planet, apparently has conveniently been working on a super badass prototype drill for a mission to Mars, and a pair of top secret titanium armored space shuttles just sitting around in storage.

Wait, what? Titanium space shuttles? What does that even mean?

Put a pin in that; we’ll circle back around. More important, this begins the section where I express how confused I am by the things that are supposed to be happening in this movie. We discover that on Stamper’s drill team is AJ Frost (Ben Affleck), and Stamper’s daughter Grace (Liv Tyler). They’re both young, fit and in their twenties - the only such people on the whole crew - and yet Stamper is shocked and enraged when he discovers they’re sleeping together. Grace also calls her father “Harry” instead of Dad, because, you know, she’s edgy like that. The implication is that they’re in some way estranged but no, she follows him around like a puppy up to the point where he leaves.

Their relationship confused me, as did the need to corner a five-year veteran like Frost at the beginning of the movie and educate him on the company’s Not Fucking Harry’s Daughter policy. But as I have mentioned before, Michael Bay characters are not so much fleshed out individuals as they are sets of attributes. Stamper is a Gruff Loner with a Dead Wife, Frost is an Impulsive Hothead, Grace is Suspicious of Dad’s Love but secretly worships him. The rest of Stamper’s crew are essentially a collection of weird personality quirks and unprofessional habits. In fact, when the team is put through the rigors of astronaut training, nobody ever asks the obvious question:

“You keep saying we’re going to land on the asteroid. Land in what?”

This is when Billy Bob Thornton figuratively pulls back a curtain to reveal a brand-new pair of shiny new space shuttles which he offhandedly describes as having “titanium alloy impenetrable skin”. And he says this in the way a real estate agent might assure you that yes, the winters in Saskatchewan are very mild. Nobody stops him to wonder why the invention of an indestructible alloy is not the biggest story in the world, rather than a lazy plot device to compensate for terrible writing?

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