Story Overview

Armageddon opens with a series of small meteor fragments striking New York, signaling a far greater threat approaching Earth. Shortly after, NASA detects a colossal asteroid—roughly the size of Texas—hurtling through space on a direct collision course with the planet. With global extinction looming, scientists devise an audacious and desperate plan to prevent catastrophe.

The mission involves landing on the asteroid, drilling nearly 800 feet into its core, and planting a nuclear device that will split it in two, allowing the fragments to pass safely by Earth. To execute this near-impossible task, NASA recruits Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), the world’s leading expert in deep-core oil drilling. Faced with an impossibly short deadline, Stamper insists that training astronauts from scratch is unrealistic and instead demands that his own rough-and-ready drilling crew be sent into space.

As the clock ticks down, Stamper and his team undergo accelerated astronaut training before embarking on a perilous journey beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Once on the asteroid, mechanical failures, human error, and unforeseen natural forces threaten to derail the mission at every turn, pushing the crew to their physical and emotional limits.

Blending large-scale spectacle with personal sacrifice, Armageddon is a high-stakes science-fiction action epic about humanity’s fight for survival. The film balances explosive set pieces with themes of courage, loyalty, and selflessness, culminating in a race against time where the fate of the entire world rests on a handful of ordinary men facing an extraordinary challenge.