Best movie explosions!

Cafe Society
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Everyone knows, a movie isnt worth a goddamn without an explosion every ten minutes. Here, in no particular order, are my top five movie blasts.

1: Opening credits, Die Hard With a Vengeance.

I ha never seen an explosion like this, gritty, realistic, scary as hell. Out of nowhere, a building is reduced to rubble in a cloud of dust and glass. Vehicles are proppelled into the air (another first for me) as shocked pedestrians look on… Proof that CGI doesnt cut it when it comes to BLOWING SHIT UP.

2: Ultimart blowout, Gross point Blank.

This is a bit more old school, a classic big fireball. This gets my vote for the events before and after: The look on Cusacks face when he sees the plastique in the microwave, to the hurt reaction of the most ungrateful clerk ever. Rewind. Rewatch.

3: Boiler meltdown, Metropolis.

When watching a ninety year old movie, maybe you dont expect great effects. Or rather, you appreciate that they were “impressive in their day”. so when the boiler reaches a dangerous pressure early on in this '20s classic, the best you hope for is a big gust of steam, and the piano music to get more frentic. Which is why your jaw drops when the boiler goes nuclear, destroying the room and catapulting men every direction. Light years ahead of its time, impressive even today.

4: For Mathilda… Leon/ the proffesional.

Not to spoil too much, but the payoff in this classic is suberb: a huge fireball blasts out of an alley and down the street as the camera races along beside it to capture its fury, throwing cars and SWAT members around like toys. All explosions should be like this.

5: The deeping wall goes up, The Two Towers.

They didnt have gunpowder in those days. Or, in this land. Or whatever. What was that they put in the hole? A big ball? Thats what saruman was playing about with earlier, he filled it with some black powder… no, i missed that, I was in the john. Who’s this lad coming now, with the torch? Determined, isnt he? Whats he going… Good jesus.

The second time I watched TTT in the cinema, I specifically turned and watched the audience at this moment, just to see 700 mouths fall open at once.

Well, thats my lot. Anyone else got a favourite explosion?

2

**The Mouse that Roared. **

You see a shot of the quadrium bomb going off, presumably destroying the Earth and all its inhabitants. Then a narrator comes on and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not the end of the film. However, something like this might easily happen, and we thought we should put you in the proper mood. And now, back to our story.” Then they return to the chase.

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Not a movie or a real explosion but:
The Simpsons - demolition of Burns Casino

“All right! Here comes the implosion!”
“IMPLOSION!!! But I thought you said …”
[Hotel explodes sending debris all over the place]

4

The end of Zabriskie Point. My favorite movie explosion ever.

5

Also, every time a baby carriage goes over a cliff or a car hits a speed bump it explodes. I love that running gag.

The Death Star was pretty cool, I must admit, both before and after it was enhanced with the fire ring.

The explosions in Saving Private Ryans final battle sequence were spectacular, especially in Dolby theater. I loved the realism of the dirt being kicked up and the craters when they were finished and ear drums being stopped up, etc…

Coolest IMplosion, of course, is the collapse of the grand staircase dome in TITANIC.

6

Destruction of Alderan was pretty shocking when I was a kid watching Ep IV. How often to movies blow up a whole planet.

7

After stealing the gummi Venus de Milo, Homer, with Marge, runs like hell out of the candy convention, chased by an angry mob of candy manufacturers. Thinking fast, he mixes a bag of pop rox with a can of Buzz cola, throws it into the mob. Giant fireball and hilarity ensues.

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See you in hell, candy boys.

I also like the explosion at the beginning of Die Hard with a Vengence. By the same token, the bus blowing up in The Seige was pretty good. Also, another Bruce Willis movie, but in The Fifth Element, the explosion on the hotel/spaceship was, IIRC, the largest indoor explosion ever.

9

From 1 to 3. The destruction of the:
White House,
Empire State Bldg
& Capitol Records Bldg
in ID4.

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This is my understanding, too. Anyone hazard a guess as to the largest on-screen explosion ever? A real one, not alderaan blowing up. Clue: its in a really shitty movie.

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The airstrike on Col. Kurtz’s compound at the end of the 35mm version of Apocalypse Now.

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Well, I’m gonna limit my selection to real pyrotechnics.

Anyway, my top 3:

  1. The carpet-bombing of the railroad yard by allied planes early in The Train. The French National Railways graciously donated a large locomotive shop facility slated for demolition. It got blowed up real good.

  2. The triggering of the booby-trapped oil pumping facility near the end of The Road Warrior. Stuff goes flying every which way, including a large chunk of metal which lands uncomfortably near the camera and appears to have gone quite a lot further than the filmmakers expected.

  3. Blofeld’s lair inside a Japanese volcano goes up at the end of You Only Live Twice. Aside from the autogyro Little Nelly, the best thing in a really rather silly movie.

Honorable mention: not really an explosion per se, but the ep of *Mythbusters where they tried to sandwich a car between two semitrucks colliding at a closing rate of 80MPH. That was pretty cool.

13

The Burt Reynolds stunt-man flick Hooper?

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Wow, I really forgot another grat explosion: The bridge gets taken out in Apocolypse Now. Consecutive dum-dum-dum-dum mortars followed by the wooden bridge disintegrating into splinters. Out-fucking-standing, team.

15

One of my favorites is in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when Butch and Sundance are standing in front of a boxcar that contains a safe full of money. They’ve lit the fuse on what they hope is enough dynamite to open the safe; in fact the entire boxcar is abruptly blown to matchsticks, knocking the two to the ground and scattering money all over the place.

Sundance: Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?

16

All the heads in Scanners.

The Nostromo in Alien.

The Enterprise’s saucer section in Star Trek III.

Gene Simmons in Wanted: Dead or Alive.

17

The Orlando City Hall in Lethal Weapon 3. AFAIK, the only movie explosion that destroyed a real building and not a mock-up or a ficticious one.

I agree with Die Hard With a Vengance, now more than ever having seen how they did that. Word is Bruce is working on #4, I wonder if they’ll try to top that.

Best explosion that never happened: the chateau in The Dirty Dozen.

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Is it in Stealth? I remember reading that they set off some ridiculous number of drums of gasoline up in Alaska in what seemed to be a sort of “fuck you” to evironmentalists, since they’d been bitchslapped in court for flying jets at low altitudes over an Australian national park.

I don’t expect to ever see it, though.

Another shitty movie has what I suspect is the best movie explosion ever in it:

Swordfish. That opening explosion had me primed for a fantastic cinematic experience. Awesome! If I didn’t waste my time with the rest of the movie, I’d have been well-satisfied.

19

The nuke in T2.

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Back in the late nineties, I forget what had happened. Maybe I’d been dumped or something. I’d had a shitty week. So I dragged my friend Paul to see John Woo’s latest movie. After the previews ended, I turned to him and said, “I don’t care how crappy this movie is, as long as shit blows up good.”

Cue the explosion, timed exactly right, and having nothing to do with the rest of Broken Arrow. It was a crappy movie, but I didn’t care.

Daniel