The destruction of the Executor in Return of the Jedi always annoys me for that reason ...I always roll my eyes when the spaceship blows up and then falls down ↓
Most Beautiful, Eye-Candy Explosions
- Thread starter Defiler-Of-Redshirts
- Start date
We have a winner.
The fun really begins at 2:08 but if you fast forward to it, you miss out on Data's toilet word...
My favorite part: Riker looks up at the broken window in the ceiling.
I'm curious, what would make a spaceship explosion more realistic (besides a lack of sound in the vacuum of space)? If a spaceship full of anti-matter blows up, it's almost anyone's guess as to what the gigantic, flaring, blinding radius of obliteration would look like. That's why in the original "Alien" movie, I loved the starship Nostromo's weirdly unique self-destruct explosion; it totally looked like some throbbing, cleansing sunrise of pure destruction.
The warp core exploded.^ Technically not an explosion, but a crash (Containing some bridge terminal blowouts of course)
^ Technically not an explosion, but a crash (Containing some bridge terminal blowouts of course)
Not untrue. The engineering section blows up (after a fast dash to herd everyone into the saucer then separate and fling it like a frisbee because of the otherwise weekly scenario of "warp core breach" was, for once, allowed to go all the way. ) Then as the saucer crashes we seen tons more console explosions (which you already pointed out
) and even transparent aluminum windows technically explode due to the extreme pressure (that would otherwise be compensated for via forcefields had there been power available). An explosion's cause can be chemically-, heat-, or pressure-induced. But that's what makes the "D"'s demise the most beautiful: The initial explosion. The initial explosion, which was eye candy in of itself (along with every other shot of the "D" on the big screen) was also just the beginning of something bigger (and not cliche). None of what followed could have happened without the initial explosion. If the "D" was allowed to fully explode with no saucer fling, that would be boring, we'd seen it before in III (which worked but one then has to outdo what happened before) - as well as subverting its most vaunted and flaunted feature of being able to pop off its hinges where needed.
And the idea for the "D"'s demise, which nobody fathomed in 1987, was genuinely perfect - get a way to force a separation and then strand them. They could be stuck in space with no warp drive, or crash the saucer onto a planet.
I would have rather seen a scenario of the crew stranded on said deserted planet, basically the KHAN stranded scenario, and seeing what happened next - a fully staffed crew to look after, no less - then just about anything TNG related that came after.
Didn't that pretty much happen in VOY's second season, during that episode when the Kazon took over Voyager, stranded the crew on a desolate planet, and the Doctor and Brad Dourif's Sudor were the only ones left to subvert them? I swear Brad Dourif is such a natural genius at creating villainous, oddly strange, enigmatic baddies.
That needs to be re-shot for a future special edition
That's the best way. If I were to do explosive effects, rather than blowing up just one model and having it come apart too fast, I might, say, make a Borg ship as a forced perspective rectangle--and run primacord down the length and have the model supported by several supports, to show the explosion progressing.
Also, I might do different parts...angles of the Borg ship. Remember the tv series BRAIN GAMES? One of the words was made of different cubes shot at a certain angle where everything lines up.
Do that with different models.
Layer the heck out of it. For the coup de grace, you have cannon behind the model fire at the camera right as the fireball of the model is about to die off into smoke.
That was re-used for the Enterprise-D's breach in Generations, and maybe another time. Same for the BoP explosion--a re-use of ST:TUC
I miss Joe Viskocil
The ID4 explosions were lovely
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I noticed that in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, there was a very similar explosion to the Grisson when the half-completed Death Star fired on one of the rebel transports; like the Grissom, it was a pink, puffy explosion with thousands of little glittery spark-things in it.
Now that I think of it, that's my favorite often re-used space movie explosion...it looks so pretty, flowery and "blossoming"; they also used a similar explosion in Star Trek II when the Enterprise phasered the Reliant's left engine to hell.
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