Explosions are cool, really cool. So cool, in fact, that it's easy to forget that things don't just explode in the way you want them to. They are governed by physics just as everything else in the real world.
But why let that get in the way of the story? If you make it spectacular enough, people will be too awestruck by the explosion to break their Willing Suspension of Disbelief because of it.
Sub-Trope of Artistic License – Physics. If the explosions are nuclear (or antimatter), you might also run into Artistic License – Nuclear Physics.
Sub-tropes:
- Ash Face: Instead of terrible burns and having skin ripped open by shrapnel, victims of a Non Fatal Explosion are simply covered in soot and may have some hair singed off.
- Bomb Disposal: If you find a bomb, do not attempt to disarm it like they do in television. Bomb disposal is a profession for a reason, and you're likely to set it off! Call emergency services and leave it to the professionals.
- Bombproof Appliance: While it is true that appliances will at least somewhat shield you, and any cover is better than none, fiction takes this way too far.
- Concussion Frags: Not all grenades are equal.
- Contain the Kaboom: Trying to contain an explosion of indeterminate force is likely to get you killed or deeply injured. Why do you think it's a bad choice to ever hold a firecracker?
- Eat the Bomb: Even Jumping on a Grenade is a safer and more efficient way to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Imagine the safety hazards if every car crash resulted in an explosion.
- Everything Makes a Mushroom: To make a mushroom cloud, you need an explosion which generates a lot of heat compared to the atmosphere around it - but the shape is distinctive, so fiction writers play fast and loose with what creates it.
- Exploding Barrels: While true that barrels of fuel can explode, it requires very specific circumstances to do so, not to mention it's dependent on what you shoot it with.
- Explosions in Space: Explosions act differently in a weightless vacuum and don't quite have the same visual effect you'd see from an explosion on Earth.
- Explosive Cigar: If this doesn't end in injury/death, it's playing fast and loose with explosions.
- Explosive Instrumentation: No, your computer is not going to start sparking just because excess power is routed to it. Failsafes in its components will kick in quickly, shutting the thing down instead.
- Explosive Stupidity: This trope is the reason that explosives are not just handed to the average joe schmuck - and if it is played for laughs, then you are squarely in the realm of artistic license.
- Flamethrower Backfire: See Shoot the Fuel Tank and Exploding Barrels.
- Hair-Trigger Explosive: While examples do exist (Just check the Real Life section), many modern explosives are specifically designed to only explode when intended. C4, TNT, and Dynamite won't just explode by being dropped, to say nothing of nukes.
- Improbable Cover: Explosions in movies can't see you if you sidestep behind a wall or jump behind a table.
- Incredibly Obvious Bomb: Don't assume that bombs are always obvious. This is why airports, subways, and the like constantly blare warnings about 'unattended baggage', rather than 'anything that looks like a bomb'.
- Impressive Pyrotechnics: It is seldom that explosions produce Hollywood-style fireballs.
- Made of Explodium: Explosions are an exact science requiring very specific circumstances to be achieved. Not so in fiction - just about anything explodes there.
- Non-Fatal Explosions: Explosions, by definition, are things expanding rapidly, such things create pressure, and changes in pressure destroys things. That's the entire point of the explosion in the first place. If an explosion is non-lethal it is either exceedingly weak and localised, or you are far enough away to be safe.
- Outrun the Fireball: The pressure wave of explosions, especially in confined spaces, move at a pace that's more than supersonic. Unless you are in a fighter jet or have one hell of a head start, you're not going to outrun it. Even if you don't aim to outrun the explosion, and will settle for the fireball, you are still looking at velocities in the 100 meters/second range.
- Relocating the Explosion: Instead of worrying about relocating the explosion, worry about relocating yourself and anyone in the vicinity.
- Ridiculously Potent Explosive: Size matters, you can only pack so much explosive power into so small a package in the real world. But why let that stop you?
- Rocket Jump: In the real world, any explosion powerful enough to propel you upward would be powerful enough to kill you.
- Shoot the Fuel Tank: MythBusters proved that it takes ridiculously specific circumstances and ammunition for this to get any sort of fireball.
- Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Basically the opposite of a Ridiculously Potent Explosive, when the explosion is smaller than it should be.
- Strapped to a Rocket: Most straps wouldn't survive the forces necessary to launch a rocket. And the acceleration of the rocket would exert forces on your body more than sufficient to kill you, long before the rocket exploded/hit something.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Explosions are far less visually impressive than often depicted in media - but that undermines the core concept of using them as spectacle
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Explosives are specialist weapons for specific uses. Using them for any other means invoke Awesome, but Impractical.
- Unflinching Walk: While it is standard procedure for those who work with timed explosives to walk, not run away after setting the charges, so as to not risk tripping and injuring their leg while still inside the blast zone, the way it's shown in media more often than not leaves the walker still inside the blast zone with debris raining down around them.
- Wire Dilemma: It is a rare bomb in real life that has accessible wires, it's an even rarer bomb that has differently coloured wires, and it's even rarer bomb for which cutting a wire won't immediately cause it to explode. Thus, we reiterate: don't start defusing bombs and get the hell out of dodge instead!
Examples that don't fit into any of the above.
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Fan Works
- Author's Note: One of the author's notes is that peanut butter is actually the main ingredient in the atomic bomb. In reality, atomic bombs (such as the one dropped in Hiroshima) have high concentrations of the fissile isotopes uranium-235/plutonium-239. Scientists select these two because of how readily they undergo the fission process. Though, some with uranium-233 also have been constructed.
Films — Live-Action
- The Creator (2023): The grenade that the robot police throw at Joshua and the others is timed to explode at twelve seconds, as clearly shown on the display. Actual grenades have fuses that last 4-5 seconds, and are sometimes "cooked off" for a second before throwing precisely to prevent the targets having enough time to throw them back - much less have a dog lazily deposit the grenade back at the thrower's feet. Needless to say, a display that clearly shows how long the target has to safely throw it back would also be an extremely counter-productive feature.
- Deep Blue Sea: A Threatening Shark is defeated by detonating ten flares' worth of gunpowder, said to equal 'Two and a half sticks of dynamite'—not only does ten flares not contain gunpowder enough to rival the explosion of two and a half sticks of dynamite, the explosion shown is far too big for even two and a half sticks of dynamite. Busted by MythBusters.
- Demolition Man: At the start, Simon Pheonix prepares to explode a building by puncturing drums of gasoline with his knife, to which he starts a fire which reaches 55-gallon drums labelled "C-4" which explode the building most satisfactorily. C-4 is a plastic explosive, and so storing it in 55-gallon drums would be inefficient at best. Also, C-4 is renowned for its stability, only exploding under very specific circumstances (it can even catch fire and burn safely, it's been known to be used as emergency cooking fuel in a pinch).
- Gettysburg had many cannons used in filming... and many horses, too. Since they were not really war horses trained for battlefield conditions, the blank charges used in the artillery scenes were cut down to 1/4, and the sounds were added in post-production. It can be spotted by watching how far the guns recoil when fired. They also produce less smoke than a full charge (which, given how smoke the quarter charges do produce, should give you some idea of how little visibility there was in the real battle).
- Steel: At the climax, the hero is shut inside of a room with a hand grenade. A hand grenade that lasts almost a whole minute to go off as John Henry Irons finally makes a good free throw (through a small opening in a grate) to save his life. Grenade fuses only take between 5 to 10 seconds to go off.
Literature
- For All Time: North Korea builds "The Glorious People's Hammer", a nuclear bomb with a blast yield of 250,000 Megatons. For context, in Real Life, the largest nuclear bomb ever built, The Tsar Bomba
, had a yield of 50 megatons and could have possibly reached 100 megatons with a different construction.
Live-Action TV
- Breaking Bad: Walter White sets up a bomb that blows up Hector Salamanca, Tyrus Kitt, and Gus Fring. Given that the bomb blasts a door off its hinges from several meters away, Gus Fring would never really have survived the blast even for a few seconds, and probably wouldn't even still have been mostly intact.
- FBI: In the season 5 premiere “Hero’s Journey”, the team scrambles to find a specially-made bomb consisting of 25 blocks of C4 with a sophisticated trigger, all capable of fitting neatly into a duffel bag. However, multiple characters speak of the bomb as having similar power to Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City device, saying it can level over a city block’s worth of area. While C4 is better than improvised ANFO, McVeigh had a device weighing in at approximately 7,000 pounds. An explosive that could fit inside a duffel bag and be carried by one person couldn’t come close to that kind of power.
- Grey's Anatomy: A patient has a shell from a homemade bazooka embedded in his chest, and when it detonates it completely vaporizes three bomb squad technicians. Even their body armor is turned to ash. No homemade explosive in an amount small enough to fit inside that setup is going to have that much power. Even the original shell from a WWII bazooka didn't have that kind of power and wasn't intended to. And if the explosion was powerful enough to completely vaporize three men (and their body armor), it would have also destroyed a large section of the hospital floor and killed Meredith outright, as she was standing less than 20 feet away.
- Money Heist: When trying to leave the Bank of Spain, Palermo threatens Tokyo and the hostages with Claymore mines, claiming that by standing behind the mines, he'd be unharmed. In reality, anything within 20 meters of Claymore mines would be subject to the explosion, regardless of their position, so if Palermo actually pressed the detonator, he'd be toast as well.
Video Games
- Fleeing the Complex: In one scene of the route Convict Allies, Henry has to defend himself against some Wall guards. In one of the options, Henry can throw a taser and Ellie can use a grenade. If both of these are used at the same time, the taser will collide with the grenade, making the explosion hundreds of times more powerful. While in real life it is possible for electricity to make explosions more powerful, the taser would not make it that big.
Western Animation
- Justice League: In the opening of “Patriot Act”, where Spy Smasher steals the Captain Nazi serum during World War Two, a barrel of benzene is ignited and explodes, sending the castle where it was kept burning to the ground. Benzene is not an explosive on its own; this only happens when it’s nitrated and thus produces nitro derivatives that are explosive, and there’s no indication of that happening here.
- King of the Hill: In "Happy Hanks Giving", one of Hank's turkeys is mistaken for a bomb just as it's about to be loaded into the cargo hold. The bomb squad lays down a charge and blows it up right then and there. Needless to say, no bomb squad would EVER detonate explosives right next to a fully-loaded jumbo jet, especially to blow up a potential bomb as the explosives blowing up could result in the bomb detonating.
