The Rock VX Gas Canister Build (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The Rock VX Gas Canister Build (2022)

therpf.com

Interestingly, the actual prop was auctioned off in 2022 for more than $18K! [0]

[0] https://propstoreauction.com/lot-details/index/catalog/319/l...

Contains closeup photos of the original prop for comparison - Thanks.

Looks like the Banana Boat Aloe Gel has significantly dried up in the original prop.

Just as a note, real chemical weapons are not like this at all. Basically, VX (in the US and basically all other countries) is stored in binary form(1), two separate, basically clear chemicals with a glass wall that separates them, and the wall breaks from the force of the blast and the chemicals mix and you have VX, but it doesn't look cool. So Michael Bay had them make this instead, because it looked better on film.

There was a famous bit from the Iraq Inquiry Committee (aka the Chilcot Report) where they found that MI6 reported a bit of intelligence to Tony Blair that a source in Iraq claimed that they produced VX at the Al-Yarmuk plant- but described what was in the movie, not real life. After it was reported to Blair that they had sources who had seen VX in Iraq, they showed the raw intelligence to someone who knew something about chemical weapons and they said "Whatever your source saw, it wasn't VX" and MI6 realized that the source was lying. (I think that this source is different from the more famous liar Curveball.)

1: Besides being bad for humans, VX is also bad for metal, and will destroy any case if kept in long term storage. Basically if you load a normal chemical weapon shell with mixed, ready to go VX it will be unusable- more of a threat to the crew firing the howitzer than the enemy- within a few days.

It's also worth noting that in the film, it's depicted as a blistering agent as well—just for gruesome effect.

By Michael Bay logic, injecting atropine also prevents one's skin from falling off.

He really, really knows how to make giant fireballs explode in time with a rocking soundtrack though.

I had forgotten about The Rock, but recently rewatched it - and halfway through I had to check, and sure enough. Michael Bay.

Also, for a more recent cheesy movie (with Nicholas Cage), Drive Angry is surprisingly good. In a bad way.

Even before the exploding cars for no reason or other of the fireballs you mention, you'll probably have seen the classic Michael Bay camera moves. The easy one to recognize is the one that starts out low pointing up at the hero then raises up as the camera circles around. It's in pretty much everything he does. I've never seen his Victoria Secret stuff, but I would not be surprised to see it there too

I was definitely getting suspicious early on. Lots of folks have copied it since then though, so I wasn’t super sure.

For one of the recent Bad Boys movies (one he didn't direct) they had Michael Bay make a cameo appearance where they shot him with one of his signature telephoto orbit techniques (orbit the subject with a long lens for a very dramatic effect). I had a good lol at that, and my SO was very confused as to what was so amusing. He also has a tendency to use low, wide shots with lots of movement and action, part of a technique affectionately known as "Bayhem"

Playing devil's advocate: why assume Iraq would (attempt to) store VX in the same way? It actually has a thin ring of plausibility around it in the same the way you sometimes hear stories that Kim Jong Il would watch American movies and demand "I want us to build that".

Because Iraq used real chemical weapons in the war with Iran. It would be sort of ridiculous to pivot to fake ones after that.

Interestingly, it might be true that Saddam Hussein did pivot to fake ones. After the complete destruction of his conventional military in 1991, it seems he decided that the only way to keep Iran or some other unfriendly neighbor from invading him (1) was to convince everyone that he had chemical weapons. This might have applied even to his own generals. I have heard that when US forces were interrogating Iraqi generals after the fall of Baghdad International Airport, they would ask them where were the chemical weapons and General A said that he didn't have any of them, but he was told that General B had them, and General B was sure that General C had them because he knew that he didn't, and General C thought that General A had them. At least, this was a story I heard verbally from someone involved, I've never tracked down the documentation to see if that was real (I was an intern working on non-proliferation before the invasion of Iraq, so I so I knew some people in that world, but pursued a different path and don't know how true this story is).

1: In roughly the same way that he had invaded Iran in 1980 when that country was in disarray after the fall of the Shah. Note that he doesn't seem to have noticed that his invasion was a huge disaster for Iraq, killing huge numbers of people, destroying massive quantities of stuff, going deeply into debt- so much debt that he decided to try and seize Kuwait, bringing the wrath of the United Nations down upon him- and gaining him exactly nothing. The idea that other leaders might be smart enough NOT to do that never seems to have crossed his mind.

Re your last point, there have been many deaths in war caused by overestimating the enemy's intelligence. Or misunderstanding their perspectives and red lines.

Good question. One point is that the chemistry is well known by the right kinds of chemists in every country and... doesn't look like that (just as a for instance, a gel that aerosolizes in the ways you'd want for a chemical weapon would be roughly Nobel Prize quality work). Another is that actually quite a bit was known about the Iraqi chemical weapons programs, and published in the UNSCOM Reports, and the level of research to achieve something like that would show up in other places, other sites, other locations, and other people.

Recall that Iraq was well known to have used significant quantities of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (against Iranian and Iraqi civilians): it was only after UN Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687- ending the Gulf War with the liberation of Kuwait- that Iraqi lost the ability to have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And so UNSCOM tracked down a lot of leads and visited a bunch of places inside Iraq for several years, looking for evidence of these, and the idea that Iraq hid the massive programs necessary to develop state-of-the-art technologies like that, and produce them in significant quantities, while remaining totally covert seems unlikely.

Back in 2002 I was an intern at a non-proliferation group in Washington DC, and spent some time talking to a (now sadly deceased) MITRE expert on chemical weapons about all of this, but I didn't take more than 1 year of college chemistry so I'm not an expert on the chemistry myself.

> Recall that Iraq was well known to have used significant quantities of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (against Iranian and Iraqi civilians)

“After the defeat the Iranians said the attack killed more than four thousand civilians — welcome to the VX gas attack” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nem_uP-bpFs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre

On a related note: for a more realistic portrayal of VX-like-agent-in-a-terror-plot, see Michael Crichton's novel "Binary".

Yeah just watched the Rock a few nights ago (on my new giant TV) and the movie holds up, but the VX gas does not make you blister up like they show in the movie, nor does it just naturally vaporize into a deadly gas. One of its strong points is actually that it is sticky and is hard to get off of you once it makes contact. It will still kill you though.

This build unlocked the memory of watching this movie as a child and being terrified that nerve gas was something I could encounter in my day-to-day life.

I’m glad I’m not the only one with that specific memory! My dad loved this movie, it was in the regular rotation of his choice for our movie nights.

The scene with the needle you have to jab in your heart reminded me of defibrillators (nothing deeper than medical heart thing = defibrillator) so as a kid I always assumed those defibrillator cabinets in public areas was nerve agent antidote! Just in case!

Well, in the UK, sometimes you can!

Or in Malaysia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam

It unlocked the memory of me watching this as an adult and remembering what an awful film it was.

Weird - I remember watching the movie as a child and mostly thinking "Boy, I wish I could bite into one of those green goo balls"

According to this chemist, those balls should be Amber colored.

https://youtu.be/asAd-E5_HPo?t=1270&si=EmU4rOGHF_XLNSSX

In my head I'm still thinking nerve gas would be used en masse in war and terrorism, but other than WW1 (mustard gas) it doesn't seem like a common tactic. And it's banned under the Geneva Convention, insofar as anyone follows that.

Regarding terrorism, some may be too young to remember the Matsumoto sarin attack in 1994 and the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995. These attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult killed 8 and 13 people respectively, surprisingly low numbers given the theoretical dangers of nerve agents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

You might find this an interesting read:

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

TL;DR is that it's not used these days because it wasn't actually all that effective, at least not when used in modern warfare. That is also why it's (mostly) honored, even though many other prohibitions under international treaties are ignored by the largest (ab)users.

However, if conditions similar to WW1 become dominant on the battlefields - and, looking at Ukraine, trench warfare at least is back in some way - this might get re-assessed.

> And it's banned under the Geneva Convention, insofar as anyone follows that.

We prosecuted the Nazis under the Geneva Conventions at Nuremburg.

Every US President since then has demonstrably broken them.

It's sort of like how growing up how to escape quicksand seemed like a very important bit of knowledge to have.

The screen-used ”guidance chip” has Uranus brand capacitors on it. That may or may not be a real brand.

Long after you are gone, you are going to give some Junk Removal person a heart attack.

"You're him. You're the Rocket Man."

My first thought was why would someone want to do this, like they're glamorizing a weapon that causes mass horrors and misery.

But I did just spend hours of the holiday weekend playing a typical video game that's pretty much entirely about shooting people. (And in this case with a sprinkling of sometimes running them through with a machete instead.)

So maybe we already society-wide glamorize weapons and killing, but the nerve gas variety of that is... only unfamiliar?

Or it is innately less-appealing somehow?

If it's any consolation, the way VX is portrayed in The Rock has almost nothing in common with the real thing.

In that it doesn't aerosolize at room temperature? (from a couple decades-ago memory of the film)

In that it doesn't melt your skin off or melt through protective gear, isn't neon green, isn't stored in silly glass beads, and usually isn't stored in active form at all but rather binary agents that are combined as late as possible. It's nasty stuff no doubt but the movie version that OP recreated is a made up weapon that just happens to use the same name, and they probably recreated it because it's an intentionally cool looking prop, not because they think actual chemical weapons are cool.

MI6 didn't know that.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/rock-scr...

You're only supposed to shoot, explode, burn or crush someone in war. Gassing them is barbaric.

It's a post from a propmaker community of replicating an iconic prop?

Movies are all about how they make the audience feel, and everyone remembers the creepiness of this particular prop in The Rock. It's awesome that someone replicated it because yeah - it's a very impressive prop because of exactly that reason - it was basically a character itself in them movie, and was an impressively constructed visual piece which was meant to exude menace.

You're doing a weird thing of saying "obviously this is about nerve gas"...no it is first and foremost about a movie, a story, and the emotional narrative it told.

I don't think this glamorizes horrible weapons. We as humans get a certain thrill from scary things. "Dracula" didn't normalize being a vampire.

Imagine trying to take this thru TSA.

"Well you see officer its a rather elaborate hand gel dispenser. If youll just give me a moment I'll show you how harmless this stuff [ampule of "hand gel" falls on floor and shatters] OH GOD WERE ALL GONNA DIE!"

Obligatory scene from 12 Monkeys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok9tswBa-ZI

I used to dig here for prop parts (lots of prop makers get parts here) and I used to shuttle them through TSA at LAX in my hand luggage:

https://apexsurplus.com/

I got stopped once because they claimed I set off their explosives detector. My wife ran off laughing as I started to nervously unzip a case filled with bomb-looking parts.

That place sounds epic. My dad used to work at the Skunk Works and would go to their surplus yard once in a while (Palmdale) and bring home some kind of piece of equipment for me to play around with. I'd usually take it apart or try and power it on. I recall having some kind of rack mount device that would turn on with an indicator light but did absolutely nothing else. Glad to see a place exists where you can still find goodies like this.

Amazing work! Thanks for sharing the link.

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