It's a Pretty nice movies i must say, especially for an open source program. Blender is on the right path but 3ds max and Maya give us more "reality" and "atmosphere" by its tools.@Mangust Don't be so negative about blender Since 2.5 it now has a really good volumetrics implementation, complete with a physically based smoke simulator and improved particle system, so explosions shouldn't be a problem. Have you seen the movies "elephant's dream", "big buck bunny" and "sintel", btw? They are short films made entirely in blender (sintel is the latest).
P.S.
http://www.forgedbychaos.com/ it is game that develops by the Russian studio PANZAR on the crytek engine 3. in gallery you can see models, movies and animations created using 3ds max. special stuff is on the panzar site.