Top Ten Tuesday: Best Destruction of a Famous Landmark

All the movies on this list feature countless thousands (probably millions in most cases) of innocent people shuffling off this mortal coil.  Human are more than likely the cause of most of the disasters that appear here.  Unfortunately, though, for all of those pesky humans that meet their demise, it’s the famous landmarks that seem to become the money shots of each of these films.  They are icons to their respective countries, but these famous landmarks never looked so good than when they were getting blown the hell up.

10. The Cyclone Roller Coaster in THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS

The 1953 monster movie THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS is based on a short story by Ray Bradbury titled “The Fog Horn” about a prehistoric monster who mistakes the warning signal from a lighthouse for a mating call. The film expanded that premise, adapting the formula of the “monster loosed amok on civilization” established twenty years earlier in KING KONG. Bradbury’s friend, special effects wiz Ray Harryhausen brought the creature, now called the Rhedosaurus, to life. Disoriented after being awoke by atomic testing, the monster makes its way to its original prehistoric home, which over the millennia has become New York City. It destroys all in its path until it is lured into Coney Island fairground (actually filmed at Long Beach Amusement Park in California) where the finale takes place as the creature is destroyed with a radioactive isotope amid the burning Cyclone Roller Coaster. THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS was the first film in which Ray Harryhausen was solely responsible for the stop motion special effects and his signature style was already apparent as we see his penchant for rampaging monsters amongst recognizable landmarks taking shape.

9. The Golden Gate Bridge in X3: THE LAST STAND

As a local Bay Area citizen I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge several times a year. It’s easily the best entrance to a city on the planet. You cross that bridge and you know exactly what you’re in for. It’s the most iconic bridge in the entire world for a reason. People from all over the world flock to see it and sure it has the highest suicide rate of any land mark on the planet, but that’s part of the mystery. X3 might have not been the perfect step for the series to take, but there’s no mistaking that it’s finale started off with a massively cool scene involving the destruction of my personal favorite land mark. Magneto storms the bridge with his mutants and in a show of strength that makes even Yoda look like a bitch, he lifts the entire golden gate bridge with almost everyone still on it, and moves it down into the bay attaching it from the piers to Alcatraz. He single-handedly attached two of the coolest land marks in California. Sure the bridge was mostly intact after Magneto got his ass handed to him, but they had to rebuild it completely.

8. The Hollywood Sign in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

Roland Emmerich seems to be the  maestro  at coming up with destructive visuals to famous landmarks.  It is his 2012 coming out this Friday that inspired this list, and, I’m sure, you’ll be seeing another movie of his somewhere else down the line here.  The great thing about THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (other than the incredibly inaccurate geography of…well, everything in that movie) is how nature seems to be chasing down its victims.  This isn’t a film about the planet crumbling underneath us, because of all of our wrongdoings.  This is a film about nature coming to life and stalking people.  Just as the ice chases Jake Gyllenhaal down the hallway of a wrecked ship, so, too, does a well-placed tornado look at Mount Lee, think for a bit, and says, “Hollywood Sign, you’ve got to go.”  The single tornado runs right along the sign, tearing up the 45-foot tall letters and sending the area back to pre-1923.  Ironically created by some of the most well-known special effects houses in Tinseltown, the scene is pretty remarkable to watch.  Now, if only that tornado could have found Whitley Strieber’s house.

7. The Washington Monument in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS

In the 1956 sci-fi classic EARTH VS FLYING SAUCERS, aliens in flying saucers give the Earth sixty days to surrender. Scientist Hugh Marlowe invents some sort of sonic gun, which knocks them off balance and, in the finale of the film, the saucers lose control and crash into various Washington D. C. landmarks.   Despite a mundane script, the movie works effectively by adopting a dry, documentary tone and splurging the budget on Ray Harryhausen’s spectacular special effects. The smooth, grey, spinning discs of EARTH VS FLYING SAUCERS have become the definitive UFO, imitated in dozens of subsequent alien invasion movies. For the film’s two most famous “money shots”, Harryhausen created detailed miniatures in order to show the toppling of the Washington Monument and the decapitation of the Capitol Building (shots spoofed 40 years later in MARS ATTACKS) and there’s always been something quite sensational in watching Harryhausen’s destructive vandalism.

6. Rapa Nui National Park in MARS ATTACKS

Could there be a movie more fun, watching so many landmarks worldwide getting obliterated than Tim Burton’s MARS ATTACKS!? Sure, it’s silly and over-the-top, but that’s all part of the fun. Along the vein of the old “cheesy” sci-fi films of the 50’s and inspired by the classic Mars Attacks! 1962 trading cards, with a heavy dose of Burton flair, this movie delivers hilarious mayhem as the Martians proceed to kill everyone and destroy everything in their wake, just teenage hoodlums running around with baseball bats and spray paint. From the Washington Monument to Mt Rushmore, the Eiffel Tower to Big Ben and even Las Vegas. But, one of the more creative and ridiculously absurd moments in this movie is when a Martian saucer released a massive bowling ball to take out the giant head statues on Easter Island. Silly, but classic!

5. The Eiffel Tower in G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

In almost a pure show of how much the live action versions of Duke and Ripcord suck, G.I. JOE managed to have one amazing piece of destruction with the collapse of the Eiffel Tower. One minute we’re hearing how the particle accelerator in France can weaponize some nano-tech warheads and the next minute we’re seeing Duke and Ripcord fail to stop The Baroness and Storm Shadow from launching a Nerf football filled with goo at the most famous structure in France and BOOM it goes down. If there was ever a question as to where the 170 million dollars went in the G.I. JOE budget, it was certainly here. Buckling under it’s own weight as it was eaten away by nano-machines the Eiffel tower fell taking out quite a few people along the way. A very nice piece of chaos indeed. The shot was so cool they couldn’t keep it secret at all and managed to squeeze it into almost every piece of promotional film for the movie.

4. The Statue of Liberty in CLOVERFIELD

Oh, how I love J.J. Abrams. He’s the creator of so many awesome movies and shows, and always delivers on coolness to the extreme. Regardless of whether you fall into the love it or hate it camp, CLOVERFIELD stands to remain memorable for one reason if no other… the decapitated Statue of Liberty! How twisted is that? The monster beheads Lady Liberty, our most sacred symbol of American justice. Granted, it’s not entirely the idea of Abrams and the writers, seeing as the concept was inspired by the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Still, that scene, above all others in the film was incredibly intense and jaw-dropping, making CLOVERFIELD worthy of praise in this top ten list.

3. Tokyo Tower in GODZILLA

GOJIRA, or for us Americans, GODZILLA! How many times has the grumpy green giant destroyed the Tokyo Tower? I tried to find the answer online, no one seems to know for sure. I would count, but that would take forever. The destruction of this landmark is almost as, if not more famous than, the landmark itself. First crunched by the mean green stomping machine in the original 1954 classic GOJIRA, the tall Eiffel Tower-like structure has been pummeled not only by various eras and incarnations of Godzilla, but also by rival massive monsters like Mothra and Gammera, even King Kong when he battled Godzilla. Take any on landmark, natural or man-made, and I doubt it’s had as many destructions as the Tokyo Tower. Here’s to resilience!

2. The Statue of Liberty in PLANET OF THE APES

Towards the conclusion of the Sci-Fi classic, 1968’s PLANET OF THE APES, just as Taylor (played to the hilt by Charlton Heston) and the gorgeous mute, Nova, have seemingly escaped the clutches of their simian jailers, they’re riding on a horse along the ocean when he sees something on the shoreline. Taylor jumps off the horse, slowly walks over to the object in slack-jawed disbelief before crumbling down into uncontrolled anger, in the mind-blowing realization that he has been home all along. In the harsh truth that his own civilization has been destroyed, Heston yells the staggering pronouncement, “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell.” The camera zooms out and pans upwards to reveal one of the most recognizable U.S. landmarks, The Statue of Liberty. Bar none, it’s still the best movie sucker-punches ever. To see Lady Liberty, with torch still raised high, ravaged by nuclear war and followed by thousands of years of erosion, permanently entombed in the sand was horrifying. While it’s essentially a full-length episode of Rod Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE, complete with the dark twist at the film’s end, it’s only more unnerving with its fade to black as the credits roll, accompanied by the sounds of the crashing waves on the shore. That last chilling shot of the landmark left audiences sitting there in the dark in silent shock. The final denouement of the disintegrating Statue of Liberty, just about engulfed by the shoreline at the ending of PLANET OF THE APES, will forever be one of the most shocking and iconic moments in film history.

1. The White House in INDEPENDENCE DAY