TITLE: ARMAGEDDON – THE CRITERION COLLECTION #40
CAST: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Will Patton, Peter Stormare, Keith David and Steve Buscemi
DIRECTED BY:Â Michael Bay
PRODUCED BY:Â Jerry Bruckheimer, Gale Anne Hurd and Michael Bay
TYPE OF MOVIE: Action, Romance, Sci-Fi and Thriller
DURATION:Â 153 minutes
Bruce Willis and an all-star cast of roughneck oil drillers blast off on a mission to save the planet in Michael Day’s doomsday space epic.
DVD EXTRAS:
• Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
• Color, Closed-captioned, Criterion Collection, Widescreen, Dolby, Director’s Cut
• Theatrical trailer(s), TV spot(s)
• Michael Bay’s gag reel
• Deleted scenes, compiled by Michael Bay
• Storyboards and production design drawings
• Analysis of the special effects by visual effects supervisors Richard Hoover, Pat McClung and Hoyt Yeatman
• Music video “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith, plus interviews with the band
• Widescreen letterbox format
• Number of discs: 2
KNOWN DVD SECRET(S): None at this time
I’m so glad that a Criterion edition of “ARMAGEDDON” was released.  The story of a huge asteroid about to collide with Earth and a group of oil drillers and NASA to prevent that from happening, what more can you ask for right?
Well, all I can say is that if you do have one choice for this movie, the Criterion Collection is the way to go.
Yes, both movies have outstanding video and the digital 5.1 is used a lot in this movie. But that’s where the comparisons end because the regular version of the DVD has no extras. The Criterion Collection version is loaded with extras. I mean fully loaded and each segment in the special features are quite long. One of my favorites happens to be the gag reel.
Also, the movie contains trailers. Oh, no…not the typical 1-3 trailers that DVD’s have, this one has many trailers. I’m not sure how many trailers I counted for the 20-second or 10-second segment. This DVD is loaded with them.
Then another cool thing about the DVD extras are how certain special effects were made.
So, yes, the Criterion Collection cost about $10 more but it is probably one of the best Criterion edition DVD’s out there. This version of Armageddon is highly recommended!
THE MOVIE:Â A-
THE DVD EXTRAS:Â A+
THE DVD OVERALL: A