Having a blast: 23 of the best movie explosions of all time

We’re starting with a low-payload, high-technical-skill hit; Christopher Nolan might go for a bigger boom with this summer’s , but he’s rarely shot an explosion that looks better than ’s biggest, most dramatic setpiece.

George Lucas can spend decades of his precious time on Earth adding CGI rings to his franchise’s biggest explosions if he wants. But we’ll still go for the fiery simplicity of the original—from 1977’s —every time.

One recurring theme of this piece will be that it’s cooler when explosions are “progressive,” extending the chaos into a line of expanding pyro. Robert Duvall’s speech in is also, y’know, okay.

See? It’s so much better when the explosions are in a line, like they are in George Miller’s two-hour post-apocalyptic chase scene, !

In researching this piece, we learned that there’s an incredibly petty pissing match still happening between certain directors in Hollywood—notably Michael Bay, and a bunch of the James Bond guys—over who has the “biggest” cinematic explosion to their name. It’s silly, and defies the beautiful simplicity of explosions. That being said, the above supercut is easily the best reason to watch Bay’s 2001 . (And now you don’t need to, so there’s 184 minutes of your life handed back to you.)

The actual pyrotechnics in are admittedly only middle-of-the-road by James Cameron’s explosive standards. But Joe Morton gets the single best death in a franchise that kills an enormous number of people, with Miles Dyson holding on until the very last moment to give the Connor family and their robot pal Arnie a chance to escape.

Look, if you didn’t want us to include twice on a list of kickass movie explosions, you shouldn’t have made the explosions in Terminator 2 kick so much ass. (a puppet created by Shannon Shea, from Stan Winston’s legendary team) exploding into a skeleton as she dreams of nuclear war is more metal than anything that has ever happened in any metal song, ever.

As far as we know, this is the only entry on this list to prominently feature well-known character actor Wilford Brimley () as one of the main things blowing up. (It also sets up one of the best dark endings in all of sci-fi film, and has a great Kurt Russell line to kick it off, so it’s not hard to see why made the cut.)

This shot, from the 2015 middle-of-the-pack Daniel Craig Bond flick , is the Guinness World Records holder for largest cinematic explosion, something the Bond people, at least, seem very proud of. (If we’re being honest, we’re including this one mostly out of obligation; it is, obviously, a very large explosion, but is it artful? Meaningful? Romantic? Are we being cynics, or did they just blow a whole bunch of stuff up and call it a day?)

This is a bit more like it: The distant shots of falling explosives in have a much more poetic appeal to them, lending some gravitas to the very abrupt death of Britain’s greatest secret agent. (This also has a Guinness record, by the way, for most explosives contained in a single shot; neither Bond film, sadly, can claim the record for biggest explosion, period, which those fun-loving pedants at Guinness .)

1988’s isn’t quite as wild as the 1985 original, but this is still a movie that ends with Jackie Chan getting in a fireworks fight in a fireworks warehouse which then explodes, and that’s a concept we have a very difficult time finding issue with.

is a classic for a reason: Say what you like about the collected cinematic works of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, but they blow up a good scale model of some very famous buildings.

Sorry, , it’s not subtle to blow up Parliament while the 1812 Overture blares in the background. Subtle is overrated—especially as compared to watching the face of Big Ben explode, timed to joyful classical music.

is far too goofy for its own good—including in its comedic prologue, where Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are extremely cavalier about a possible bomb threat. But, this explosion does get points for verisimilitude: That’s actually the former City Hall of Orlando, Florida, which was slated for demolition as Lethal Weapon 3 was filming; Warner Bros. paid $500,000 for the privilege of letting director Richard Donner and his crew take the chore off the city’s hands.

When it comes to blowing stuff up, it’s hard to beat ’s John McClane. This is just a great-looking movie explosion, even before you get to the resulting fireball vengefully trying to follow McClane back up the elevator shaft to take its revenge upon its perpetrator.

You can argue about whether 1995’s is the point where the franchise became entirely silly, as opposed to just mostly silly. But you can’t argue that director John McTiernan didn’t still have a steady hand with an explosion, performing a gorgeously shock-wave-y bombing while Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson do tandem “Don’t look at the explosion we’re jumping away from” duties.

The best detail in this explosion, from the climax of Kevin Costner’s poorly remembered , is seeing the oars propelled out of the side of Dennis Hopper’s big boat by the force of the explosion. Such attention to detail is the stuff that are made of.

Cecil M. Hepworth’s 1900 short film Explosion Of A Motor Car isn’t the most visually impressive explosion from the early days of film—but it might be the funniest. The actual explosion is handled with some then-revolutionary trick photography, but the real joy is in the comic timing of the body parts of the unfortunate motorists raining back down in the aftermath. An early triumph in understanding the raw comedic power of a good explosion.

Alec Guinness’ second appearance on this list—sort of—is far more tragic and ugly than the first, with his character stumbling toward something like redemption in the climax of David Lean’s World War II classic, . Not a bad explosion, either—especially once the crashing train is added to the mix.

One of the most excessive moments of Paul Verhoeven’s ever-excessive career arrives here, in the midst of his cult satire , as Verhoeven and his team blow up a decent-sized chunk of the South Dakota Badlands. The result is a truly beautiful spreading explosion—even if the screeching CGI bugs do detract from the effect a bit.

George Miller makes a return appearance to our list (in a film released several decades earlier) in this climactic moment from the second Mad Max film, . You love to see an explosion that doesn’t mind taking its time; the oil refinery at the center of Miller’s film has a leisurely detonation that lets us savor every moment of burning guzzoline.

Look: knows you’ve been waiting 110 minutes to see this fucking bus blow up, and director Jan de Bont isn’t going to leave you hanging. As Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock look on, the planet’s least lucky bus finally slows down in the most climactic way possible: Slamming into a plane, the better to maximize the payload as this poor piece of public transport finally gives up the ghost.

If you’re ever tempted to forget that the 1990 vigilante superhero movie is a Sam Raimi flick, look no further than the moment that serves as an origin story for Liam Neeson’s Peyton Westlake. The death-by-drinking-bird is already deeply hilarious, but the most Raimi touch comes after Westlake’s lab has mostly finished exploding—when his still burning body comes flying out of the wreckage with an audible “Aaaaaaaah!” We’re not entirely sure Raimi meant for this to be as funny as it is, but we’ve watched it on repeat about a dozen times, and it still hasn’t stopped making us laugh. Good explosion. Great delivery.