What it’s about: The team at NASA, led by Dan Truman (Thornton), discovers that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and will wipe out life on the planet in 18 days. Too massive to be redirected, the only way to stop it is to drill 800 feet into its surface, plant a nuclear bomb, and blow it apart from the inside. In order to pull this off, they’ll need Harry Stamper (Willis), the roughshod owner of a drilling company who never backs down from the most dangerous jobs. But Harry needs to bring the experience and rapport of his own team into space, a ragtag bunch of misfits, including the hot-headed A.J. (Affleck), who’s kicked up tensions between them by involving himself with Harry’s daughter Grace (Tyler).

Reflections: Oh boy, this movie. This was absolutely inescapable in 1998: the biggest, loudest, dumbest movie of the summer, with big stars, flashy visuals, and an epically schmaltzy Aerosmith theme song that got beaten into the ground by radio and MTV. I saw it, thought–even as a teenager–it was stupid, and the only reason I own it now is because I found a used copy put out by Criterion and was compelled to understand that. How could a movie so loaded with broad one-liners and immature characters, with such a preposterous premise, that thinks Ben Affleck playing with animal crackers on Liv Tyler’s belly is in any way sexy and not weird have anything artistically serious going on?

Perhaps serious is the wrong word, but there is something at work here: a kind of American mytho-poetics, big and loud and dumb because America is frequently big and loud and dumb. This isn’t a movie that’s worried about exposition or gritty verisimilitude–this is a fantasy of the working-class hero rising to the occasion despite his flaws. He’s not anti-intellectual: he’s educated, understands machines, works with his hands but uses his brain. But he is uncomfortable with his emotions and is pushed to prove his character in the moment where it truly counts. That idealistic archetype has a huge place in the culture and it deserves both interrogation and celebration; this film leans enthusiastically into the latter in an almost abstracted way. Everything from the script–which, in addition to the final credits, featured contributions from seven other writers, including Tony Gilroy and Robert Towne–to the then-frantic editing which was regarded as chaotic and confusing at the time but feels more apace with modern aesthetics, to the overwrought goofiness of the performances, is all working together to keep things clear and exciting and moving, to keep the stakes and the emotions high, and to consistently foreground this notion of overcoming both internal and external challenges through sheer grit, raw belief, and emotional honesty. And that level of coherence is an artistic achievement.

None of that makes it not big and loud and dumb, to be clear. This is not a film that’s meant to be challenging or subverting anything. It’s not trying to make you think or show you something you don’t know; it’s trying to make you feel good about something you do know. The optimistic, mainstream Americana of the ’90s can be a little hard to get into these days, and because that is such a big part of what this is doing, that’s a little bit of a barrier. But there is also some larger and more general idea about the human spirit underlying the adventure and Bay is at his best in bringing that out on a gut level, tapping into physical, instinctual responses in the audience through the mechanics of action storytelling. Just don’t overthink it.