Made Of Explodium / Live-Action Films

• Parodied in 21 Jump Street, when they first crash into a fuel truck and nothing happens, then they crash into a dynamite truck, also nothing happens, then they crash into a chicken transport, which explodes immediately.
• In Accepted, one of the students expresses an interest in learning to blow things up with his mind. In keeping with South Harmon's DIY curriculum, he is allowed to major in mental detonation and classes are engineered to help him do so; later in the movie the same student is seen focusing intently on a pineapple, but beyond this it seems forgotten-until the very end, in a credits gag. The dean of the college who opposed South Harmon's accreditation is walking towards his car when suddenly it goes up in a massive Hollywood fireball. He stares for a moment before we cut over to the same student, looking satisfied, and Justin Long, who is blown away by the speed (and success) with which he has accomplished his goal.
• Among countless other ridiculous things about the movie Armageddon (1998), the Mir space station explodes shortly after Bruce Willis's team docks there, for apparently no reason other than to get one of the wise-cracking Russian astronauts to escape onto Willis' ship, in order to provide comic relief for the rest of the movie.
• Inverted in The Artist: When George burns the film reels, they take quite a while to get a good blaze going. However, since film of that era was literally made of explodium (aka nitrate), it should have turned into a massive fire in seconds. Nitrate films (made prior to the introduction of Cellulose Triacetate (safety) film in 1948) had to be stored in thick-walled concrete bunkers because they were so flammable. This video shows some examples in its first 2 1/2 minutes, and an even more spectacular example starting at 4:25. Safety film is non-flammable. Get it hot enough and it will melt, but it won't burn, as this video shows.
• Batman Begins has an electric monorail crash. It explodes spectacularly, what with all the combustible material in a monorail and a microwave emitter.
• In perhaps the biggest example in film, Battlefield Earth, Planet Psychlo has an entire atmosphere that is made of explodium! Their air reacts violently with strong radiation, so a strong nuclear bomb is all it takes to destroy the entire planet. Wow. Fridge Logic ensues when you realise that its sun should be bombarding it with more radiation than every nuclear bomb ever built, every second.
• At the end of Bride of the Monster, an octopus explodes (apparently due to Mad Science) with stock footage of a nuclear blast. Yes, it's Ed Wood. That was done at the request of the producer. He was anti-nuclear power.
• In The Chase (1994) the female protagonist wishes to make a point, so she shoots a nearby helicopter with one, count it, one shot from a 9mm pistol. It promptly goes up in a fireball, shocking everybody present and defining her acquired badassitude.
• Parodied in Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. A car TA is in is launched into the air, flips and lands on its wheels. The driver turns to Toxie and warns that American cars tend to explode a few seconds after landing and they gotta get out of there. They bail just before the car goes up in flames.
• Con Air. Everything, but everything, including motorbikes just... crashing... explodes like it has c4 strapped to it.
• Cutthroat Island had lots of stuff blowing up real good.
  • The villain's ship at the end was blasted when the powder magazine igniting caused the entire ship to burst into flames and shrapnel. And this still didn't harm the treasure that everyone spent the movie fighting over... This could be Truth in Television though, since it was not unknown for ships that caught fire to explode spectacularly when the flames reach the powder magazine.
  • The part where a lantern falling on a table causes an explosion that knocks the windows off a tavern is a particularly blatant example.
• Deep Blue Sea makes exploding sharks cool again (this time, it blows up by impaling it with an explosive powder-covered harpoon and then igniting it).
• In Deep Impact, an astronomer gets run off the road by a semi-truck, and his Jeep explodes in mid-air.
• Derailed (2002): When the bar car falls off the destroyed bridge, it explodes in a fireball. Why an empty train carriage should explode is never explained.
• The film Demolition Man has one of these when the cryo prison explodes at the end of the film when machinery starts to spark.
• In the movie Doomsday a car flies through a bus. Despite only hitting the glass windows, and not the engine, gas tanks, or anything else remotely combustible, the entire length of the bus still manages to explode (the car, being driving by the heroes, is perfectly fine). This is made even worse by the fact that buses and other large vehicles are nearly always powered by Diesel, which is hard enough to light (not that gasoline is exactly easy) yet alone cause to explode. Then again, CNG and LPG and now Hydrogen are sometimes used as fuels, but still very rarely.
• Subverted (partially) in Duel. In the final scene David Mann (played by Dennis Weaver) drives his car up a dirt road leading to the edge of a cliff. As the truck approaches, he aims his car at it, before jamming his briefcase onto the accelerator and leaping clear just in time. The car itself catches fire when the truck hits it (rather than exploding) and the truck driver, blinded by the smoke and flames, is unable to stop before reaching the cliff, and the truck plunges over the edge. Surprisingly, despite being a tanker, and having "flammable" written on the side, it doesn't actually explode.
• D-War contains a scene in which six helicopters explode spectacularly within minutes of each other.
• In Eagle Eye there is no such thing as a simple car crash. Everything just burns up or explodes.
• In The Fifth Element, mega-corporation owner Zorg quite literally makes his products with explodium. That way, he can deliver You Have Failed Me retribution upon his mooks over the phone (public phones, anyway), simply by pressing a few buttons. He also builds it into his guns with a bright red button, so anyone stupid enough not to ask the purpose of the button is appropriately punished.
• In the original Godzilla the streets of Japan explode every time he takes a step.^note This could be a result of underground gas lines.
• The Green Hornet Serials:
  • Justified. The flying school being investigated is running an insurance scam: take out life insurance on their students, send those students up to solo in planes equipped with incendiary bombs (and almost no fuel), collect insurance on both the plane and the student after the crash-and-burn.
  • Played straight in the second serial, when a fire sweeps through an ocean liner in the time it takes the Hornet to get a one-page confession out of a crook.
• In the film Grizzly, the killer bear is finally killed when the hero shoots it with a bazooka, causing a massive explosion.
• Double Subverted in Groundhog Day. Bill Murray's character drives a pickup truck over the edge of a quarry. It lands upside down, crushing its roof, but does not explode. Chris Elliot, looking over the edge, weakly suggests that "He might be okay." The truck then suddenly erupts in a massive fireball. To which Elliot concedes, "Well, probably not now."
• In Hell's Highway, Jack's car crashes into a gas station and everything immediately explodes.
• In the 90s cheesefest Hudson Hawk, an ambulance goes off a ramp and explodes in mid-air.
• In The Incredible Hulk a thrown forklift in a factory explodes quite spectacularly when it hits the... bottled soft drinks?^note A lot of forklifts run off of propane or similar flammable gases. However, it still produce too big of a fireball. Later on, two cars are seen at the end of an alley way lightly crashing into each other (a crash that would barely cause a fender bender in real life) and a large flame erupts between them almost instantly.
• A satellite actually explodes upon colliding with an alien spacecraft in Independence Day. Justified; hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, used for maneuvering thrusters on satellites, is explodium. These 2 chemicals are hypergolic - they ignite on contact with each other without any ignition source.
• The airplane from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom crashes because it was out of fuel... but it naturally explodes anyway. A tank full of fuel fumes is much more explodey than a full tank of fuel, but the explosion somehow leaves the snow completely unmelted.
• James Bond films in general are quite prone to this, but some take it to ridiculous new heights.
  • In The World Is Not Enough a helicopter explodes the second it touches the lake it's falling into, vaporizing as though it were made of magnesium. It was on fire after being hit by a missile though.
  • Die Another Day has a hovercraft crashing next to a concrete bunker, and both end up producing a gaseous explosion.
  • Quantum of Solace featured the Supervillain Lair which chain-react explodes into a spectacular fireball in the finale. The cause of the explosion? Backing a jeep into a parking garage wall at 15 mph. Structural Engineering at its finest. Comedian Dara Ó Briain called the film on this at an awards ceremony; Olga Kurylenko, in the audience, shot back that the building in question was a real hotel. Dara's response? "Yeah, but it's not made of dynamite, is it?" Well, it was a hydrogen powered hotel.
  • GoldenEye has a radio antenna exploding... Nuff said.
  • Licence to Kill has the villain's mountain base explode because of one little beaker of burning gasoline.
  • A similar situation occurs in Spectre, where Bond blows up the Supervillain Lair by firing at a gas tank.
• Jaws:
  • Speaking of exploding sharks, Jaws ended with Sheriff Brody stuffing an oxygen tank in the shark's mouth, then shooting it. The tank explodes, spectacularly reducing the shark to chum. Steven Spielberg has said in interviews that he knew how silly it was, but he figured that if the audience was still with him this far into the movie, they'd go that one last step.
  • Then in Jaws: The Revenge, the Spectacular Exploding Voodoo Shark gets impaled on the bowsprit of a research vessel and promptly explodes, and rather lamely at that.
• In Judge Dredd, Rico demands that Central hatch his incomplete clones. Doing this causes the entire cloning facility to suffer a catastrophic meltdown for no apparent reason. Although, really, the last four words of that sentence could be appended to a description of any aspect of the movie.
• In Killdozer!, several random items in the camp explode when the bulldozer runs over them.
• Used both ways in Last Action Hero, to lampshade this trope. Early on, in the movies, every car explodes with one shot. One even explodes just from getting a man thrown through the windshield, and another explodes in midair. Later, in the real world, Jack Slater fires his gun three times at a fleeing car, expecting it to explode. Three dents appear in the trunk, and the car drives away. And then the villain ends up exploding when he gets shot at the end for a last-second Lampshade.
• The villains in The Legend of Zorro attempt to blow up the Transcontinental railroad with a train car full of nitroglycerin.
• Parodied in Loaded Weapon 1 when the bikes Colt and Luger confiscate from two children explode. Also happens even more improbably when Colt flicks a cigarette butt into the sea at the start of the film.
• At the end of The Marine the Big Bad runs a semi cab through some small wooden buildings that explode in huge fireballs. While you can see some oxygen tanks in there they still explode on contact when they're designed to take some abuse before they go off in real life. Otherwise, oxygen tanks spontaneously combusting would be the number one killer of the elderly.
• Played for laughs in The Naked Gun: a bad guy is fleeing from the police and crashes into a tanker truck, which naturally explodes. The guy survives only to continue riding the flaming wreck into a large missile that's being towed on a trailer for some reason. The missile surprisingly dosen't explode... until it crashes into a fireworks store.
• Played for laughs in Planet Terror where zombies cause cars to explode. "We'll take my car." Car explodes in the background. "We'll take your car."
• In The Rock a San-Francisco Cable car, a vehicle that has no engine and no electronics (it's propelled by grabbing onto a cable that runs the length of the route and is pulled by a massive stationary motor), explodes at the end of a car chase. Considering the scene in question is often considered the Magnum Opus of car chase scenes, it's not questioned.
• Justified in Runaway where the evil scientist wires his robots and gizmos with "densepacks", which explode if captured by the good guys.
• In a deleted scene in Shanghai Noon, a runaway train explodes when it runs into the END OF THE LINE barrier. The director admitted that the explosion could not be logically explained.
• Nominally justified at the end of Speed, when a bus with a bomb on it runs into an airplane full of fuel. One gets the impression that the entire movie was a setup for that scene alone.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic sings the title theme of the Leslie Nielsen film Spy Hard. The final note of the song is so ridiculously drawn-out that the song ends with Al's head exploding, rather gruesomely.
• Star Wars
  • In The Empire Strikes Back, after Wedge trips the AT-AT walker, another snowspeeder comes into to finish it off and blows it up with just a few laser blasts into its weak neck armor.
  • There are several in Return of the Jedi:
    • Jabba's Sail Barge explode after having its own blaster cannon fire on the deck. Presumably it hit either its own gas reserve (highly volative due powering an energy weapon) or the barge's fuel cells.
    • In the final space battle, one of the Star Destroyers in the background is hit by a laser bolt from a rebel Calamari Cruiser. The laser bolt doesn't look particularly strong, and the Star Destroyer doesn't appear to be suffering from any visible damage, but regardless the whole ship gets consumed by an explosion like it's The Hindenburg. And shortly after that, the Super Star Destroyer Executor gets a similar treatment when it crashes into the side of the Death Star.
    • The shield generator antenna on the Forest Moon of Endor. This one had been filled with demolition charges.
  • Both Death Stars, courtesy of being torpedoed into reactors that can power a planet-shattering superlaser. That, and intentional sabotage for the first one.
• In the cult classic Streets of Fire, Cody blows up a gang's motorcycles with a shotgun, one shot each. Forgivable as this movie is basically a compilation of action movie tropes played straight.
• Apparently, the pickup truck that kicks off the plot in Super 8 is Made of Explodium, as it is all that it takes to derail a train in a spectacular fireball. This is a case of Truth in Television, as train wrecks are one of the more destructive wrecks one can be in.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
  • Subverted: a tanker truck overturns and slides into the forging factory and you're thinking of the first film, when a similar tanker truck exploded near the climax. "Nuh uh!" says James Cameron, who has "Liquid Nitrogen" prominently displayed on the side. And then Ahnold notices the T-1000 freezing . . .
  • It is played straight earlier on, however, when the big rig being used by the T-1000 crashes into an overpass, rupturing the fuel tank, which explodes, despite being diesel fuel.
• Also Subverted in Terminator Salvation when they ram a fuel tanker into the Harvester. Kyle Reese shoots it a few times, but it doesn't explode. (In say, a Michael Bay film, you'd have expected a slingshot to make it blow up like a nuke.) It finally goes up in a giant fireball when the fuel leaking from the shotgun holes is ignited with a flare. (This is actually probably one of the most realistic examples of the way things explode in real life. Nothing was going to happen until the escaping fumes hit the right fuel-air ratio for combustion.)
• In This is Spın̈al Tap, the other members of Spinal Tap claim that their third drummer died by spontaneously combusting on-stage, during a show. The same fate befalls their current drummer, just before they strike it big in Japan.
• The climactic scenes of the semi-obscure Jackie Chan movie Thunderbolt feature some of the most ridiculous auto racing scenes ever to be recorded on film. Among other things, the race features a number of cars exploding for a variety of reasons, up to and including no reason at all. But the film's Crowning Moment of Explodium comes when Jackie's car launches off another car and flies right through the center of a wooden observation tower which, of course, explodes.
• Top Gun. Jet manufacturers must put self-destruct bombs on their planes to prevent anyone surviving any weapon hit.
• Top Secret! has a scene with an out of control jeep that finally slows down almost to a stop... but not quite. It gently taps the bumper of a Ford Pinto, and both vehicles immediately explode.
• Total Recall (1990): A Johnny Cab bursts into flame after hitting a wall at maybe five miles an hour. It was already shorting out before then, because Ahnuld uprooted the driver. Li-ion battery tech (it was an electric cab) is fairly pyrotechnic stuff (see: laptop battery recalls).
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, even concrete tubes can explode!
• Treasure Of The Four Crowns:
  • At the beginning, the ruined palace JT escapes from inexplicably explodes after he leaves. Repeatedly.
  • Brother Jonas collects the hair of his disciples and lights it on fire for a ritual. The hair immediately explodes.
  • After JT absorbs the power of the crowns, he turns Brother Jonas into a skeleton... which then explodes.
• There's the aptly named ass-blasters from Tremors 3: Back to Perfection. Not only do they light their own farts on fire to achieve enough thrust to glide after prey, they explode spectacularly if exposed to any sort of intense heat such as a can of unleaded gasoline ignited by one ass-blaster's own acid spit in Burt Gummer's basement. Burt Gummer being Burt Gummer, the gunpowder he keeps for his weapons goes up in flames soon after that, taking out his entire fortification.
• In UHF, during "Weird Al" Yankovic's Rambo-inspired Indulgent Fantasy Segue, a Korean soldier explodes in a massive fireball after getting shot with an arrow.
• Justified in Van Helsing; a horse carriage falls into a gorge, and naturally explodes in a huge ball of fire. However, the carriage does have a rather large explosive device in it on a timer set to go off about halfway down the gorge.
• Justified in The Wages of Fear and its American remakes Violent Road i.e. Hell's Highway (1958) and Sorcerer (1977); all involve transporting dynamite which has sweated out its nitroglycerin.
• In Where Eagles Dare (1969), Lt. Morris Schaeffer (Clint Eastwood) and Maj. John Smith (Richard Burton) first kill the German soldiers who are transporting them to the Schloss Adler in a Mercedes 340B, then to cover their escape, push the car with the dead bodies over a handy cliff. Halfway down the slope to the creek below, the car explodes for no readily apparent reason. The rest of the explosions in this highly "boom"-prevalent film, however, are justified by the heroes' policy of leaving timed demolition charges behind them wherever they go.
• In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Wolverine takes down a helicopter, the tail end of which explodes upon hitting the ground. Not so bad. But then Wolverine exchanges dialog with a crash survivor and walks away, lights a trail of gasoline coming from the same helicopter, and makes it explode again in the background.
• The ENTIRE mansion in X-Men: Apocalypse. There is just no conceivable way that a jet engine exploding could completely obliterate a building that size. On the flip side, it allows Quicksilver to become an avatar for the Rule of Cool in what is undeniably the most awesome scene in the whole movie, and the entire movie franchise to date.
• Quite a few things in xXx appear to be made of explodium, but none more so than the state Senator's Corvette that Xander steals and drives off a bridge in the opening scene of the film. That durn thing looks like it blew even before it hits the ground. Special mention goes to a barn exploding from being shot.

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