Independence Day vs Armageddon – Face Off

Nowadays, it seems as though the world is coming to an end every three to four months at the movies. This is mostly thanks to the preponderance of superheroes at the multiplex, where every villain has a plan to destroy our planet, if not every planet. But for a while there, the world coming to an end was a slightly more novel idea; it was usually left up to Bond villains to threaten humanity’s very existence.

In the 90s, however, the entertainment value of witnessing our own extermination started to pick up steam at the box office and the more memorable ones had civilization looking down the barrel of annihilation. You can probably credit Roland Emmerich for this. In 1996, his Independence Day reignited our passion for seeing large-scale alien-invasion-style mayhem inflicted upon the populous. If you weren’t around back then, or are too young to really remember it, it’s difficult to overstate just how impressive those early ID4 trailers were, and how stoked for the movie most of us were.

A couple years later, Michael Bay would smash apart a few cities with the threat of much, much worse to come in Armageddon, where an asteroid the size of Texas is the antagonist, which is considerably scarier than the “comet the size of Mount Everest” that hurtled toward the planet in Deep Impact, released just two months prior. Michael Bay knows how to blow stuff up real good, and Armageddon (with the great Bruce Willis) gave him his first real chance to lay waste to some of our favorite cities, not counting the time Sean Connery and Nic Cage tore up much of San Francisco in The Rock.

While neither movie is ever going to sit atop any Greatest Films of All Time lists, they’re surely two of the most significant disaster movies ever released. That’s why we’re putting these two Earth-crashers in the ring to see which one is the ultimate in the genre: It’s Independence Day vs Armageddon in this edition of Face-Off!

This episode of FACE-OFF was written by Eric Walkuski, edited by Jay St. G, narrated by Shawn Knippelberg and produced by both Adam Walton and Chris Bumbray while Berge Garabedian is executive producer. As usual, thanks for watching our show and we’ll see you next time!