Up To Eleven / Film

• Named for the amplifiers used in This is Spın̈al Tap. It's then promptly deconstructed when Marty asks Nigel Tufnel why the amps go to eleven when they could have just made ten louder. Nigel's brain breaks. "These go to eleven."
  • The film has a rating of 8 out of 11 on IMDB. (For other films, the scales go up to ten, though even for Spinal Tap, the user can only give up to ten.)
• In The Princess Bride, Christopher Guest plays a character who also goes to eleven (fingers). The film also has suggests breaking the scale to perhaps up to five someday. But definitely not to fifty!
  • "Not to fifty!" is itself an example: in the book, it was merely "not to twenty!".
  • Note that Christopher Guest also played Nigel Tufnel.
• Love Actually has Colin who believes that his British accent will make him insanely hot in America it does, but while Americans do find people with British accents sexy, the film makes it out that any British guy who walks into a bar in America will immediately have the hottest women throwing themselves at him later resulting in a foursome.
• Lightsabers in Star Wars are cool. But then Darth Maul tops this with a dual blade saber in The Phantom Menace. And then, General Grievous wields four lightsabers in Revenge of the Sith.
  • Irregular Webcomic! parodied the concept, predicting the escalation before Episode III came out.
  • And this strip◊ of Diary of a Crazed Mimbanite, back when all we had to go on was the Episode I trailer.
  • In canon, the Expanded Universe series New Jedi Order has Lord Nyax, with eight lightsabers (surgically implanted into his wrists, elbows, and knees). One of the latest RPG books finally gave us a picture of him… He is a very silly-looking Cuisinart◊.
    • The ones on the elbows makes sense though, if the enemy hits them he's going to have a hard time powering through even with two hands, allowing you to get a quick jab in.
  • A few villains use a lightsaber style with three lightsabers, none of which are actually held.
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens introduces Kylo Ren, who's lightsaber has a lightsaber crossguard, technically topping Darth Maul's double-ended lightsaber with three blades on one saber (which sort of makes sense, since if you're going to have a crossguard on your lightsaber best to use one of the only things that can reliably stop another lightsaber.)
• In a more meta-example for Star Wars, according to the actors from both trilogies, George Lucas' primary direction was "faster, more intense"; it got to the point where Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) said they wanted to give him a board with the phrase written on it to make his directing easier.
• A New Hope starts with a Star Destroyer completely dwarfing the Tantive IV it's chasing. Later we see the (presumably) same Star Destroyer flying towards the Death Star, and just get smaller… and smaller… and smaller…
  • Star Wars loves playing with scale in this way. In The Empire Strikes Back, we see a whole fleet of those Star Destroyers that seemed so huge at the beginning of the previous film... Then something casts a shadow over one of them. It's Darth Vader's flagship, the Executor, which is 19,000 meters long.
  • Speaking of the Death Star, thought a mobile base the size of a moon with a Wave-Motion Gun capable of destroying an entire planet was intimidating? Say hello to the Starkiller Base from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a literal mobile planet at least 4-5 times the size of the Death Star, with a Wave-Motion Gun built into it capable of destroying entire star systems. And while the Death Star has to be orbiting the planet it's targeting, the Starkiller Base can take aim from halfway across the galaxy.
  • Come to The Rise of Skywalker and the villains now have a fleet of Star Destroyers, each equipped with a planet-destroying laser.
• The villains of The Frighteners are going for a murder world record even from beyond the grave.
• Piranha 3D : The whole movie, and especially the end.
• Stephen King wanted cinema houses to play the sound as loud as possible when showing his film Maximum Overdrive—so it would be the loudest movie ever. He later admitted to abusing a popular local anaesthetic during its production. Whether this was connected may never be established conclusively.
• Zurg's Ion Blaster in Toy Story 2 goes up to 11.
• The Hunt for Red October has Captain Tupolev: "Inquire of the engineer of the possibility of going to 105% on the reactor", and then going to 110% when he doesn't think 105% is fast enough.
  • It's pretty close to the trope namer in that in this case, "100%" represents a safe maximum power output level, not the theoretical or even practical maximum output of the reactor, like 10 on Nigel's amp. Given the setting, "100%" probably represents what the reactor system can handle without burning up the sub plus a reasonable safety margin. In the original book, a Soviet Alfa-class sub actually does have a reactor meltdown and gets a hole the size of the superheated reaction mass burnt through its hull and sinks.
• At the beginning of the first Back to the Future, Marty plugs his electric guitar into Doc's ginormous amps and blows himself across the room with the blast emitted from playing a single note. It seems Doc had taken the speakers up by a POWER of 11 during a recent experiment but hadn't had time to tell Marty yet.
• Saw 3D supposedly includes a trap that was "so bloody, so disgusting, and so disturbing, the producers wouldn’t allow them to put it in any of the [previous] Saw films – until now". (source) This in a series that is known for its gory and disturbing traps, and they wouldn't let this one be put in because it was too much? You can bet it will go up to eleven. That, or be a complete anti-climax depending on your opinion.
• In The Villain, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a White Hat character with a seven-shot six-shooter. When asked why he had it made, he simply looks confused and said "I don't know".
• In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World there's an amp vs. amp battle between Scott's band, Sex Bob-omb, and the Japanese DJs the Katayanagi Twins. The Twins kick off the battle by cranking their amp up to 十一 (11 in Japanese). This little bit also doubles as an Arc Number/Mythology Gag, as the Twins are Ramona's fifth and sixth Evil Ex-Boyfriends^note  "Evil exes." who Scott has to fight over the course of the film. 5+6=11.
• There's the guitar scene from Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, where Chong, in a pot high, decides to pretend he's Jimi Hendrix. His guitar is rigged to a big maxed-out amp, and the entire neighborhood knows he's playing. People outside run for cover, a dog covers his ears, and the neighbor's house shakes. Cheech even has trouble getting inside to stop him since the blast from the speaker keeps slamming the door in his face.
  • Later on, he tries the same routine in a record store and blows out a "cheap" amplifier within seconds.
• Clockstoppers. So, you're in hypertime thanks to your Applied Phlebotinum watch. What happens if you get another watch and go into hypertime again while you're already in hypertime? Zak finds out in the climax.
• In Aladdin, when Iago steals the lamp, he mimics Jafar congratulating him for doing the deed, saying, "On a scale of one to ten, you are eleven."
• In Spaceballs
  • The Spaceball's version of a Star Destroyer, Spaceball One, is so huge that the pan down its length takes minutes, and President Skroob has to resort to a Jump Cut to travel between plot-relevant rooms since doing it in real time would have taken too long.
  • The ship then travels at Ludicrous Speed because light speed is too slow.
  Barf: "They've gone to plaid!"
• The production design, characterizations, dialogue, plot and music in Batman Returns exhibit this trope in terms of Gothic-ness.
• In St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold, this trope returns to its origins, with an amp that goes up to eleven.
• Godzilla has frequently been increased in size so that he can still look massive compared to the increasingly taller skyscrapers he demolishes. From Gojira to Terror of Mechagodzilla, he was 50 meters high. The Return of Godzilla made him 80 meters high. And from Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah to Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, he was 100 meters high. Then Godzilla (2014) comes along with the makers of the film promising that this would be the biggest incarnation of Godzilla yet. As this Yahoo! Movies article puts it:
  "Godzilla's always been rather large. But now he's, like, really rather large."
• In Penguins of Madagascar, when Dave tests the ray on Private, he decides that since Private is extra cute, he should turn the power on the ray up all the way. This works against him when Private escapes at the last second, as Dave assumes the ray killed him as a result of being overcharged.
• In Deadpool 2 the dial on a ray gun looks like this◊.

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