The American public got a long-overdue apology when Michael Bay admitted this week that Armageddon, his Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler-starring asteroid blockbuster, was not very good.

In an interview with the Miami Herald, Bay had this to say about his movie.

I will apologize for Armageddon, because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine.

Armageddon was the second asteroid apocalypse-themed movie to come out in 1998. The first being Mimi Leder‘s far superior and less watched Deep Impact.

The apology is a bit of a surprise coming from Bay, who isn’t really known for his humility. Blaming the studio, however, isn’t really a very original excuse. Besides, the major problem with Armageddon always seemed to be that it expected you to take “space dementia” seriously. That sort of seems like something that should have been fixed in pre-production and wouldn’t really be affected by an abbreviated shooting schedule.

Also, Armageddon didn’t have Téa Leoni in it.