What is it about movies featuring a shoot-load of destruction that gets people so damn excited? Is it the pyrotechnic eye-candy? The rush of adrenalin from witnessing such property damage from the comfort of uneven sofas?
Or maybe its imagining the massive heart failure and loss of bladder control of the insurance investigator who gets assigned to the blossoming mountain of movie wreckage left behind once the credits roll?
Whatever the reasons, we at fractalmatter love to watch films that keep Ikea in business.
Here’s our rundown of the favourites. Bomb apetit.
Mo - Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Films that involve mass property destruction don’t get any more intelligent or bombastic as a James Cameron movie, and Terminator 2 is the prime example.
A modest opening where humanity has been all-but-devastated by the rise of artificial intelligence is encapsulated in a skull-filled wasteland, with nice shiny lasers causing death, destruction and possibly the odd epileptic seizure.
Skip forward passed a naked Arnie throwing leather-clad bikers around and Linda Hamilton glaring at you in a scary/sexy way and then the real destruction begins.
Windows broken? Check. Car crashes, motorbike stunts, trucks swerving this way and that? You bet.
More bullets are fired and more explosions ensue than in an average election campaign, and that’s before you get helicopters, armed police, a liquid Terminator getting all pointy and stabby and to culminate, a prophetic glimpse of a future nuclear attack that blows all hell to buildings, streets, people and playground horses.
Al-Armageddon
No one does the apocalypse quite like Charlton Heston. The Omega Man himself, Mr ‘They’ll get my handgun when they pry my cold, dead, increasingly demented and politically really REALLY dubious hands off of it’ himself delivers the opening narration as we watch a peaceful prehistoric Earth get a colossal asteroid right in the face. Cue mass extinction, Aerosmith and Charlton intoning grimly how it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. Probably because the commies want it to.
We jump ahead millions of years to discover that the pinnacle of human achievement is…Bruce Willis. Well, actually I suppose the pinnacle is Bruce Willis’ daughter, played by Liv Tyler. This is one of those rare Liv Tyler movies where she’s actually allowed to act for a little while and is actually pretty good. As is Mr Willis himself, who experiments with a southern accent for a bit, explains to us that he may be an oil drilling expert but he gives a huge chunk of his money to Greenpeace and then shoots Ben Affleck.
Then, New York is largely destroyed. Billy Bob Thornton looks really worried. The camera zooms around a lot. The Hubble Space Telescope takes a photo of an asteroid so unbelievably huge that it basically has a ‘YOU’RE BONED’ sticker the size of a motorway attached to the front. Suddenly, Bruce has more on his mind than shooting Ben Affleck again. He has to save the world, he has to save it by drilling. Drilling a lot.
Armageddon’s one of those movies it’s really easy to make fun of, hell I just did and I love it. From the chest beating dialogue to the Aerosmithtastic soundtrack this is big, brassy, broadstroke storytelling and you know what? I love it. It’s a 1970s disaster flick with the volume turned all the way up and it never, not once, lets up. This is the only film I’ve ever seen where whether or not a nuclear warhead is going to be detonated BY HAND is a minor plot point. Never before has a film been so crammed full of manly men doing manly things in space and never before have those manly men been such a jaw-droppingly good collection of actors.
Willis is easy to mock but frankly he doesn’t deserve it. He’s an effortlessly likeable leading man and whilst this is straight down the middle it’s also a good performance. He’s ably backed up by Tyler, until she’s called on to do nothing but look pretty and cry, Will Patton as the sort of amiable schlub that only Will Patton can do and a supporting cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Clarke Duncan, Owen Wilson, Peter Stormare, William Fichtner and Keith David.
Let’s look at those names again shall we?
Steve Buscemi, Mr Pink! In space!
Billy Bob Thornton, Slingblade! In space!
Michael Clarke Duncan, the Kingpin! In space!
Owen Wilson, weird Texan guy who works with Wes Anderson and his brother a lot! In space!
Peter Stormare, Hollywood’s favourite foreigner! In space!
William Fichtner, the nuts FBI agent from Prison Break! In space!
Keith David, Childs from The Thing! At Mission Control!
That’s even before we get to Affleck. Easy to knock and never deserving it he, like Willis, is effortlessly good here and the final scene between the pair of them is that rarest of things, a Michael Bay emotional moment that actually IS. Also, if you want two and a half hours of pure entertainment, I implore you to pick up the two disc DVD. The Affleck commentary is one of the flat out funniest things I have EVER heard.
But move past all that and the property damage and what you have, in Armageddon is a movie about heroism. There’s a great scene which is nothing more than Thornton and Willis talking after everyone else has gone home which is just electric, these two senior guys admitting to themselves and one another that they’re probably screwed whatever they do. There’s a payoff to it as well, in the closing moments which is as understated as Bay gets and which brings a lump to my throat every single time. This is a movie, fundamentally, about a bunch of under funded, underappreciated people being called on to do something impossible and doing it anyway, no matter what it costs. It’s a hymn to space travel, a movie about heroism in the face of total destruction and the only film in which Steve Buscemi has ever ridden a nuclear bomb and shouted ‘Guys! It’s time to embrace the horror!’
As much property damage as the others? No. What it does have is bags of heart, colossal amounts of totally unsubtle flag waving and sheer, unrelenting spectacle. Oh and if you ever want to really, really upset a LOST fan? Point out that JJ Abrams worked on this as well.
Sabrina - The Day after Tomorrow
In terms of property damage The Day after Tomorrow ranks pretty high, taking out the entire northern regions of the planet.
The film is based around one of those global warming theories, namely that we are destroying the planet and here is what could, might, will happen. The idea that the North Atlantic Current changes due to the imbalance of fresh water and salt water is initially a little goofy but it is a genuine theory and anyone who lives in the north of the planet should fervently hope it stays that way.
Unfortunately the film has a tendency of most disaster films that are made in the US, they mostly feature the US. DaT (Day after Tommorow shortened) does give a little nod to Scotland, Tokyo and England but little else.
Los Angeles California is the first hit taken out by tornadoes (tornado alley being more in the mid part of the US), the Hollywood sign is shredded. Next up was Tokyo with killer hail the size of golf balls (it looked more like footballs) and then New York where the film is mostly centred upon as paleoclimatologist’s Jack Hall’s son, Sam is stuck in New York city.
Its Hall’s warning to the vice president that kicks the film off with a dire warning of what could happen if we keep ruining the planet only to have it happen a bit sooner than anyone expected.
With his son stuck in New York City Hall decides to make the trip to get him out of there, losing one of his crew and practically freezing to death in the process. Meanwhile his son is trying to keep the people around him alive including a girl he likes, who though brainy doesn’t think to mention a wound that she got which of course gets infected and she almost dies. Still, it is the only film ever made which features a romance blossoming in the midst of a global ice age and an argument over whether the Gutenberg bible should be burnt to stay alive.
Tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, torrential rain, hurricanes, 3 mass snow storms where the eye of the storms drop to approximately -100 degrees Fahrenheit pretty much takes out the northern part of the planet.
That’s a lot of property damage, but fun to watch.