KA-BOOM! A vicious, deafening sound follows the shockwave that knocks the main character to the dirt. Everything fades to black, but only for a moment. Our hero awakens quickly and pulls himself up from the ground while brushing the dust off his shoulders. As the black, viscous smoke clears, our hero becomes aware of the newly-created carnage that surrounds him. All he sees in every direction is twisted metal and collapsed buildings, and in that moment, he realizes what lengths his enemies will go to in order to achieve world domination. The hero pledges then and there to stop the antagonists, no matter what the cost.
Does this scene seem familiar to you? I’ve witnessed it at least a hundred times in at least a hundred different action films. Sometimes there’s a different setting (a spaceship instead of a city), or a different hero (a kung fu priestess instead of a rugged ex-cop), but the scene stays the same. Everything is going relatively okay for the hero, and then there’s a massive explosion which changes the tone of the entire film. In fact, the only real difference from one generic movie explosion to another, I think, is that they’re always getting bigger. It’s almost as if the pyrotechnic effects guys are trying to out-do each other with each new film. For example, in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, they’ve set a new Guinness World Record for the largest explosion ever set off in a feature film with the actors present in the scene. If that sounds excessive and extremely dangerous, that’s probably because it was.
Why do these cinematic explosions captivate us so? You’d think that after the first few times we see them we’d get used to them, but that never seems to happen. In fact, explosions are literally everywhere, even on your television. There are shows like “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel that blow things up in the name of science. There are shows like “Maximum Exposure” on network TV that show clips of other people blowing things up for fun. There are even entire networks, like the “Military Channel”, that show professionals blowing things up in the name of peace. Even my good buddy the Internet is inundated with things that go boom. Heck, I challenge you to spend five minutes randomly clicking links on YouTube without finding a video of something exploding. Good luck! I only lasted three minutes before I accidentally found a home video of an exploding watermelon somewhere in Utah.
In order to try and better understand this phenomenon, I watched as many explosions as I could find. I watched films like “Big Trouble in Little China” and “First Blood”. I watched internet videos of fireworks plants exploding in violent plumes of violet. I even watched a mini-marathon of “Mythbusters”, because…well, I would’ve done that normally, but that’s not the point. Anyway, I think I’ve come up with a little theory about why explosions are so much fun to watch, and I’d like to share it with you today.
Explosions bring us together. You may disagree with this, since explosions are normally used to break things apart. However, just one look into the crowd of an Independence Day celebration should change your mind. Once the fireworks start, all the people in the crowd, regardless of age, race, or religion, look up and enjoy the display together as one. You can hear the cheers from miles away as the sky is illuminated by our multi-colored man-made marvels. Conservatives and liberals, rednecks and hippies, even geeks and jocks can gather together and enjoy all kinds of explosions as unified Americans, whether these bursts are online, on TV or in the movies. In a way, we’ve come to associate explosions with our very patriotism, and that’s why I believe explosions really do bring us all together.
Or maybe they’re just cool to look at. I do tend to over-think these things. Why not e-mail me at geeknation@ardmoreite.com and let me know what you think?
