Red Mercury (film)

Red Mercury is a 2005 British film starring Stockard Channing, Pete Postlethwaite, Juliet Stevenson, Ron Silver and David Bradley, and directed by Roy Battersby.

Plot

The film is a thriller about a terrorist kidnapping. Three terrorist bomb-makers get a tipoff that their safehouse is about to be raided; flee on foot; kidnap hostages in an attempt to escape.

Production

The film was written, produced and filmed over a four-month period.

The film was the first film aimed for a Western audience produced by a new film production company named Inspire, that planned to apply Bollywood film production methods to films made in the United Kingdom:

According to the producers the writer, Farrukh Dhondy, was interviewed by British counter-terrorism officials, to verify that the bomb-plot in the script was unrelated to their active investigations.

Cast

Red mercury

Red mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition purportedly used in the creation of nuclear bombs, as well as a variety of unrelated weapons systems. It is purported to be mercuric iodide, a poisonous, odorless, tasteless, water-insoluble scarlet-red powder that becomes yellow when heated above 126 °C, due to a thermochromatic change in crystalline structure. However, samples of "red mercury" obtained from arrested would-be terrorists invariably consisted of nothing more than various red dyes or powders of little value, which some suspect was being sold as part of a campaign intended to flush out potential nuclear smugglers. The hoax was first reported in 1979 and was commonly discussed in the media in the 1990s. Prices as high as $1,800,000 per kilogram were reported.

History

References to red solid mercury first appeared in major Soviet and western media sources in the late 1980s. The articles were never specific as to what exactly red mercury was, but nevertheless claimed it was of great importance in nuclear bombs, or that it was used in the building of boosted fission weapons. Almost as soon as the stories appeared, people started attempting to buy it. At that point the exact nature of the substance started to change, and eventually turned into anything the buyer happened to be interested in. As New Scientist reported in 1992, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report outlined that:

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is a 2004 video game that is available on the Xbox and Microsoft Windows platforms. It was released on the Xbox for the United States on June 15, 2004 and released on June 18, 2004 for parts of the world using the PAL system. It was released on the PC for the United States on September 21, 2004 and released on October 1, 2004 for parts of the world using the PAL system.

Tommo Inc. purchased the rights to this game and digitally publishes it through its Retroism brand in 2015.

Gameplay

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is an action-oriented first person shooter based on modern military weapons and equipment, although presented as a "Summer action movie" rather than a hardcore realistic military simulation. It is similar in feel to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, although it actually pre-dates the first game in that series by 3 years. Players proceed through linear levels while battling terrorists and hostile Russian soldiers using an assortment of modern firearms.

Red mercury (disambiguation)

Red mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition purportedly used in the creation of nuclear bombs.

Red mercury may also refer to:

See also