Dunno if these qualify or not but I remember being left with nothing but happiness at The Road to El Dorado.

+1 National Treasure.

Also The Iron Giant is pretty feel good at times.

- Captain Ron
- Zombieland
- Star Wars - Episode IV
- Back to the Future series
- A Few Good Men
- The Island
- Ratatouille
- Aladdin
- The Pursuit of Happyness
- Private Parts The Deer Hunter? That's one of the most depressing movies ever!
Might as well add "Threads", "The Day After", and "On the Beach".

Excellent choice! I love that movie.

Oh geez, has the government really acquired a new technology for a "death ray" requiring an update to the movie? Or are they using drones instead of normal planes?

Don't forget Testament, Defcon 4, Miracle Mile, The Divide and an HBO exclusive movie called "Control", and if you want to go for the biological warfare scare, there's Warning Sign.

Definitely not "feel-good" movies, but they can put one on "high alert".

Probably has to be The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

After Cool Hand Luke, I might have to watch Shawshank Redemption again to cheer me up :P

If we're talking movies that will always be able to bring me out of a funk, then I have to go with:

The Fifth Element
Galaxy Quest
The Princess Bride
LA Story
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
16 Candles

I don't think so, but the government has created high-powered lasers for shooting down missiles. Normally the highest-powered ones work by super-heating plasma at a point rather than a continuous beam like in "Real Genius", mainly because lasers consume power like a vacuum sucks. There's videos of these lasers around. I had to do research on high-powered lasers for a short-story I wrote recently.

AFAIK the government gave up military applications of lasers in favor of "solutions" that are cheaper to create and apply. That was more of an 80's thing with Reagan's "Star Wars" program.

Thanks for this awesome list. Hulu has "Defcon 4", so I'll watch that tonight. "Testament" I've heard of but was a little put off by the religious overtones in the description I read. Maybe I'll give it a go. Hell, I'm running out of post-apocalypse movies to watch ("Invasion of the Humanoids" and "Cherry 2000" are two of my obscure favorites).

Here's a laser that can destroy missiles as well as small boats and drones. An even bigger laser is in development:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/10/us-navy-test-laser-weapon-persian-gulf

Cool, but that's on the link I provided (listed as 2013 "Laser Weapon System"). That's only a 30 Kwatt one. There's ones in the *millions* of watts, but they require gigantic power sources. Read through that link thoroughly. (or just look at this one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laser_types#Chemical_lasers)

Systems like that never go into general application. They're limited production runs until the budgets wear out because cheaper solutions always prevail. That list has a whole slew of these sort of high-end projects that see a few prototypes and then are never heard from again.

I'm personally more of fan of the railgun, myself. "fire the railgun" just sounds better than "I'm firin' mah lazors", IMHO.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/01/14/navy-exploring-more-uses-for-futuristic-rail-gun-technology.html

Check the angular vector of the moon!

Lord John Whorfin: Where are we going?
The Red Lectroids: Planet Ten!
Lord John Whorfin: When?
The Red Lectroids: Real soon!

"All we are is dust in the wind," dude.
[Socrates gives them a blank stare]

Like I told my last wife, I says, "Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it's all in the reflexes."


I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"

Airheads
Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny
The Blues Brothers
Down by Law
The Bucket List
About Schmidt