Fire From Below

Have you ever read an entire page of a book, only to realize that you don’t remember a single word? That’s what watching Fire From Below was like for me. Even as I was watching it, I recognized that I didn’t actually understand what was happening. Normally, disaster movies have gaps in logic or reasoning, but Fire From Below goes beyond the gaps in logic – it just doesn’t have any. The tag on the poster reads, "The Laws of nature have just been broken." I now realize that the marketing team was trying to warn me.

Basically, after a group of miners strike … something, a sparky fire tentacle begins terrorizing a small town in Texas. It is apparently caused by the stuff they’re drilling for: a huge supply of a lithium isotope, the L-6 isotope. What is the L-6 isotope? I’m glad you asked. According to the “sexy” business lady over at Drake Industries, the L-6 isotope has huge potential to be used in long-running batteries and in alloys for plane bodies. There’s only one flaw: it is highly combustible with water. Yes, to you and me, this seems like a bad substance to tack onto an airplane, but Mr. Drake dreams big.

Black Hole

Black Hole is the first movie that lets the blog live up to its name. It stars Judd Nelson and Kristy Swanson as two scientists racing against time to stop both a black hole and an energy monster from devouring St. Louis.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking: “Yes, but does Judd Nelson do the fist thing at the end?” No, unfortunately, he does not. I understand if you don’t want to keep reading, but I suggest you continue, as this movie isn’t so different from The Breakfast Club.

The movie starts with the following information: “In 1999, a panel of nuclear physicists discussed the possibility that a heavy ion collider experiment could result in the formation of a black hole. After an extended debate, the panel decided that such a scenario was not just highly unlikely, but impossible.”

“Well,” you think, having read all that. “That was a surprisingly anticlimactic movie.”

But then! –

“They were wrong. ”

And with those three words, you know that this movie is no joke. It’s rare that a movie flat-out warns you that nuclear physicists were wrong. But this movie goes there, and you have to respect them for that.