Week of May 12, 2005, Issue #499
FILM
Beam me up, Hollywood!
By DARREN ZENKO
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, 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 shit 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