Ben Affleck-A.J.
Liv Tyler-Grace Stamper
Billy Bob Thorton-Dan Truman
Will Patton-Chick
Steve Buscemi-Rockhound
But before I get kicked out of the critics community, let's just be anally retentive for a few moments and point out all of the various technical mistakes. First of all, there is not nearly enough atmosphere on the asteroid to create the fire and the sparks that are shown. And there is absolutely no gravity on the Mir space station, I don't care how the hell it's turning. And it says that this comet is swining in three directions, yet every time they look at the Earth it's in the same place. And the very simple fact that nobody, and I do mean NOBODY could get a space shuttle launch ready in two weeks. It takes months to get through all the paper work they put in front of you.
But really these mistakes don't take away from the movie. It's one of the critics biggest problems that, instead of actually giving people what they like, we tell them what they like. If we could just actually stop for a few second and realize that a movie dosen't have to be the next Citizen Kane to be worth a movie ticket. We seem to nitpick everything down to the phone, and forget that people actually like to be complete and utter morons for a little while.
The story isn't much in this movie, but that's not really the point. It basically concerns a deep core driller named Harry Stamper, who many say is the best alive. But he's overprotective of his daughter, who is madly in love with a cocky, young, roughneck who works on Harry's crew. But this is all interrupted as the U.S. Goverment suddenly notices a big rock in the sky that has a very dangerous chance of hitting the Earth and eradicating all life. So they need to call in Harry and his team to come in and go up and drill a hole into that asteroid so that they can put a nuke in there and make a really cool computer-generated thingee. So the first part of the movie is basically having to train these big, burly, absurd portraits of masculinity (dubbed "the wrong stuff" by the crew)to man a space flight. This part is actually more amusing then you night think by that description.
But after they've trained these guys, there's the matter of saving the Earth. So they rocket off, dock at MIR first, blow MIR up (I'm still not sure exactly what happened in that scene), get a kooky cosmonaut on board, and then blow more stuff up. And they drill. Or something.
Yeah, the plot dosen't always make a lot of sense, and there are enough scientific errors to drive a Science teacher insane. But that didn't seem to matter as I sat through this utterly ridiculous, yet totally entertaining, piece of eye candy.