#42 - America's Atomic Bomb Tests: At Ground Zero

Well, here we are. The second disc of a three DVD set, in which the first disc was quite possibly the most boring thing I have ever seen in almost twenty-nine years of life. Will I be able to sit through another DVD of horribly tedious scientific fact reporting? The very foundation of what I am doing here is at stake. I want to be able to sit through everything, good or bad, old or new. Of course, one of the points for all of that is to find good movies in places I wouldn't normally look. Going in, I knew that this had no chance of having that happen. What was possible was that it was going to be as bad as the first disc, and I just couldn't sit through that again, and the last disc would be totally out of the question.

It turns out, that this one wasn't as bad. Don't go crazy. I'm not saying it was good, but it had a little more going for it than the first one. Think of it as a sharp stick in the eye versus a sharp stick in the eye while riding a small pony. So, what are we dealing with here? Well, looking at the picture, we are obviously dealing with houses blowing up, but its more than that. You may have seen those red/orange colored film clips of various houses and other objects being blown to bits. Those film clips were from the series of bomb tests that this DVD is about. Oh crap. I have to admit I was interested to see some history behind footage I have seen before, but never knew what it was. That's really what made this better than the first one. It was still in the boring educational film style, but it was nowhere near as scientific.

The scientists for these tests were testing everything. They set up planes, buses, tanks, cars, trains, houses, trees, all sorts of different materials at different distances from the blast site. Basically, they wanted to know how all of these things would react to an atomic blast. So they set up cameras to record things getting desrtoyed by the blast waves, and that was absolutely fascinating to watch. As they were testing different types of materials, I found myself thinking, "Why don't they just make everything out of the stuff they build the cameras with?". The cameras never stopped working during the tests, so build things out of the same stuff.

If you read my review of the first DVD in this set, then you know I ranted a little bit about how boring it was. This one, not so much. It wasn't great, but I have to admit, it was interesting to see so many different items getting blown to bits. Also, it was interesting to see the source of the clips I had seen at various times in the past. But don't rush out and get this one, it just ain't worth it. I am sad to say that this one wasn't bad enough to make me not want to watch the third one. Wait a second, I don't want to watch the third one, but this second one wasn't so bad that I won't watch the third one. So get ready, sometime in the future there will be a review about another round of boring atomic bomb tests. YIPPEE!!!!!