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Greatest Beams In Movie History
_Laban_ writes "Vue Weekly has summarized the greatest beams in movie history. From the article: 'They slice us, they disintegrate us, they roast us alive, they level our greatest monuments and pinpoint our deepest fears.'"
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 shit'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, th