Armageddon and Old Lace

By Gordon Hopkins Science makes life better.Overall, I mean. Yes, I admit science has given the world a few clunkers, like the atomic bomb and traffic accidents and autotune and robocalls. Still, if you do the math, I think you’ll discover the good science has done far outweighs the bad.The latest example of this occurred on September 26 of this year, when a spacecraft launched by NASA, roughly the size of a refrigerator (a full-sized one, I mean, not one of those hotel minifridges), smacked into an asteroid.This was not merely NASA’s attempt at a real-life version of the old Atari Asteroids video game. (Although, if I worked for NASA, real-life versions of old video games would probably be my department.) No, the mission was called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and the point was to see if it was possible to divert an asteroid or meteor or comet or some other large, celestial body headed toward the Earth. This little blue planet has been visited by space rocks many times before but the last time a really, really big one bumped the Earth, the result was the extinction of the dinosaurs.The asteroid was called Dimorphos. Personally, I think it is a bad idea to give them names. Once you do that, you become attached and it becomes harder to shoot a projectile the size of a refrigerator at it.Nevertheless, Mission DART proved to be a rousing success. The course of the asteroid was considerably altered, thereby proving that we can prevent a big space rock from striking our home planet.This is great news, and not just because it may help keep the human race from going the way of every major appliance in “The Flintstones.”It now also means that one of the worst tropes in film is finally obsolete. Never again is there any reason to produce another pompous snoozefest like 1979’s “Meteor.” Remember 1998’s awful, bloated, overbearing, loud double feature, “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”?Even the great George Pal’s attempt at the genre, “When World’s Collide” (1951), in which the body hurtling toward Earth is another planet, is simultaneously both too ridiculous and too somber to take seriously.Honestly, I've never seen a "giant rock about to smack the Earth and kill everyone" movie that wasn't terrible.The only example I can think of that is even watchable is “The Green Slime” (1968), and that’s because they make the giant rock a subplot that’s done a third of the way through the movie and, instead, focus on gloppy, green monsters. Plus, it has a hip, jazzy theme song that ranks right up there with the one from “The Blob” (1958).Seriously, there is no reason to ever make another one of those terrible movies again and that alone is worth the billions we spent on Mission DART.

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