JoshH Posted June 25, 2005 Posted June 25, 2005 From Slashdot Good for a chuckle FILM BEAM ME UP, HOLLYWOOD! By DARREN ZENKO We count off the greatest beams, lasers, death rays and photon streams in movie history They slice us, they disintegrate us, they roast us alive, they level our greatest monuments and pinpoint our deepest fears. But they also transport us, link us, serve us, protect us and illuminate the path to fortune and glory. They are beams, the glowing lances of focused radiation that have lit up our movie screens—and our imaginations—since some unknown caveman accidentally scratched a birchbark negative and became prehistory’s first FX guy. Here at the dawn of 2005’s summer blockbuster season, it’s as good a time as any to look back and salute the Great Beams of Film! The list is not exhaustive; hopefully the reader will find its many glaring omissions inspirational. Death Star beam, Star Wars Set aside the standard suspense-creation of a countdown list—that ****’s for Cosmo and David Letterman. We all know who wins this contest, so let’s get this bad boy outta the way quick. Which bad boy? The bad Death Star beam boy, of course. A full-on, no-nonsense, kill-everybody-now planet-smasher, it’s as if millions of lasers cried out in terror and were suddenly awesome. Also, the gunnery crew had those cool helmets with the underbite blast shields. Martian heat ray, War of the Worlds (1953) Yeah, it was just sparks. But you know what? Sparks are hot. And when those red-hot sparks are streaming out of a gooseneck hose mounted on a sinister floating (walking, actually, on invisible “legs” of force) organic blob of a War Machine, you know some Earthling real estate’s going to get seriously messed up. The Martians also mounted disintegrator guns on their space tanks, but it was their all-consuming heat rays that produced the shock and awe that has informed 52 years of cinematic beamery. Scanning beam, Tron It makes no sense, but it sure is awesome: a beam that sends real-world stuff (like people) into the internal world of computers. The greatest thing about the Tron scanning beam is its quickness, its precision; it had kids all over the world staring hard at objects, fantasizing the beam by waggling their fingers quickly back and forth in front of their eyes and going zk-zk-zk-zk-zk-zk. It wasn’t just entering the computer world that fascinated them, it was also the scanning itself... they dreamed that in addition to Karateka, Lode Runner, Bruce Lee and The Print Shop they could add orange, hamster and Dad’s Playboy mags to their box of pirated 5.25” floppies. Proton streams, Ghostbusters They’re produced by unlicensed nuclear accelerators, they’re untested and they’re not to be crossed; the ghost-snaring proton streams are perfectly realized on film with a wild, unpredictable, snaking blast of barely-controlled pure energy. Look at those dudes! They can barely hold on to their projector nozzles. These are truly the weapons of a gang of irresponsible genius science-cowboys with nothing left to lose but their immortal souls. Brilliant. Pure love, The Fifth Element Earth, air, fire, water and... ether? Phlogiston? Sorry, Mr. 18th-Century Alchemical Theorist; no matter what Georg Stahl says, the fifth element is love, sweet love. How else to explain that a stumbling admission of affection from Bruce Willis could make a despairing Milla Jovovich barf a spectacular stream of concentrated good stuff into orbit, saving Earth from the mumbling menace of Evil Planet? Radioactive breath, Godzilla et al. Some debate on including this one, but come on! A coherent high-velocity flow of energized radioactive gas is a beam in anybody’s book. The King of Monsters wasn’t shy about using it, either; many a parcel of not-quite-so-high-priced Japanese real estate was reduced to a glowing pile of forever-uninhabitable rubble and slag by a casual whiff of Godzilla’s nuclear breath. Many square metres of opposing giant monsters’ hides got the same treatment. The best part of Godzilla’s breath, though, is the beautiful timing of the thing, like a great pop hook: when those dorsal plates flicker with energy, the pause before the pain is positively delicious. Crotch laser, Goldfinger “Do you expect me to talk?” No, Mr. Bond, we expect you to get sliced in half by an exquisitely simple laser, starting at your Thunderballs and working up from there. Actually, we expect you to escape, make some “dry quips” (actually witless puns), drink some booze and bang an international supermodel, but we do so dearly love these excruciatingly close shaves. And Auric Goldfinger’s crotch laser is the most excruciating of all, cutting as it does (or threatens to do so) into the very essence of your hypermasculine persona. The thin red beam (optics nerds: I know, I know! Just pretend it’s really foggy in that one part of Goldfinger’s lair, okay?) is pure class, and with the implacability of the relentless mechanism and the Freudian horror of the target zone, it’s a beam for the ages. The map room ray, Raiders of the Lost Ark Before there were lasers, masers, tasers and phasers, there were holes in walls; that’s how the ancients generated their beams, and their rate of fire was annual, if that. Dark, murky stone cavern all year long and then one day—zap!—a shaft of light does its beamy business. For giving us a wonderful moment of old-school beam-mongering, the map room in Raiders of the Lost Ark makes the list. The eerie model city, the precious headpiece of the Staff of Ra, Indy swathed in wicked bad desert robes, the brilliant payoff when the location of the Well of Souls is revealed... a cheer-out-loud scene of pulp archeological triumph, centered around one brilliant ray of gloom-piercing sunlight. Of course, this is just Indy unwittingly doing the heavy lifting for dastardly Nazis, but what else is new? The SOL laser, Akira What’s a post-apocalyptic Japanese military-industrial technocracy to do against a bloated, screaming prematurely evolved, unstoppably powerful psychic wild talent tearing up Neo-Tokyo and threatening to obliterate life on Earth by unearthing the dissected remains of an even more godlike fluke of human evolution? Slice his arm off from space with a beam from the Satellite Orbital Laser platform, of course. You only get one shot at a demigod, though—well, one good one and one panicked follow-up—and the SOL blew it, but you’ve got to love the precision of a laser that can knock a limb off a moving (writhing, actually) target from 400 miles up. The White House wrecker, Independence Day The space aliens in Independence Day may have had computer systems with lousier security countermeasures than Paris Hilton’s porn-packed Sidekick (zing! Dose, here I come!), but they sure knew how to wreck **** up with beams. Nothing fancy, either, just classic flying saucer ship-to-ground pillars of thunderous, shining destruction. Just beautiful. But the best part is, they got in personal. The ship that capped the White House was so close to the ground, it was basically putting its gun to humanity’s head. They weren’t just wiping out human civilization, they were wiping out human civilization execution-style. Lifetime achievement award: Star Trek Ah, Trek. The beams of Star Trek—phasers, ship-mounted and handheld—were television-born and nothing super-out-of-the-ordinary in the movies, so they’d technically miss the list on two counts, but the sheer volume of Trek beamery over four decades of screen sci-fi has been outstanding. Add to that the fact Trek’s teleportation system popularized “beam” as a verb, and it the undying zombie of space adventure more than deserves this special Lifetime Achievement Award. Here to accept the award on behalf of Star Trek, who couldn’t be with us this evening, is Gordon Gould, who not only invented the laser but was the first person to use the word “laser”! Thanks, professor, for everything. Beeyoo! Beeyoo! Beeeeyoo! V
mello yello Posted June 26, 2005 Posted June 26, 2005 How could they leave out Dr Evil's classic "Fire the LASER" ....Oh and the award for "Best use of lasers in a feature film highlighting skin tight shapely gymnastics and various erotically inspired poses on a beautiful model" must go to Catherine Zeta-Jones in "Entrapment" ......thank you Catherine, thanks for the mammaries (oops)..umm memories
Digicruiser Posted June 27, 2005 Posted June 27, 2005 "War of the Worlds" lasers. Can I have one of those on the top of the car?
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