15 Most Awesome Explosions In Movie History

3. Independence Day

You can't talk about iconic movie explosions without mentioning the White House destruction in Roland Emmerich's Independence Day. You just can't.

The aliens' ultimate, merciless display of power sees them annihilate the White House like it's nothing, reducing it to a pile of flaming wood.

The explosion is widely - and rightly - deemed a landmark in visual effects for the period, achieved by creating a miniature White House and detonating it with approximately 40 explosives.

The "realism" and the detail of the explosion is one thing, but the pièce de résistance was surely the decision to add a helicopter to the front of the frame in post-production, which is also swallowed up by the explosion.

And lest we forget, the scene was also hilariously recycled in the second Austin Powers movie, which by itself is enough to earn it a high spot on this list.