Hollywood’s always eaten itself, wearing hoary old tropes on its sleeve proudly. Think of the gorgeous dame who turns out to be nothing but trouble of a thousand noir thrillers or the Power Walk – when the heroes walk slowly towards the camera, shoulder to shoulder in a show of unity, strength and their intention to bust heads (you’ve seen it everywhere from The Wild Bunch to Transformers including a classic parody in Monsters, Inc.)
But here’s one you might not realise is so popular until you remember how many times you’ve seen it, the religious-tinged, almost orgasmic shaft of pulsating light into the sky. Nothing yells ‘climax’ like it, and here’s a random sample that barely scratches the surface.
You’ll notice a lot of the entires in this list are from more recent films. The reason is simply because shafts of light are a lot easier to program into your Maya workstation than hand animate. Somewhere a software engineer is making a killing out of a plug-in called ‘Climactic Shaft of Light into the Sky’.
8 The Last Airbender (2010)
When Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) find the resting place of the mythical Airbender Aang (Noah Ringver) in the ice, they awaken both Aang and his big pet flying dragon thingy. But they don’t just stand up shaking the ice off their heads. It cracks open with a huge beam of energy that shoots a piercing beam of light majestically into the sky.
9 Tron: Legacy (2010)
It’s a portal to the outside world, so what else would it be but a huge twine of light, a hundred beams of data and computer code gushing urgently into the air through a boarding platform somewhere deep in The Grid. Luckily for Sam (Garrett Hedlund) and Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the programmer-turned-digital-hippie-guru Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has more power than the evil CLU (young CGI Jeff Bridges) realises, holding him back while the young couple step into the beam to the escape.
MovieHole for the rest
xoxo
Carrie
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