Top Five: Nuclear War Movies
1) Threads (1984)
I have only watched this movie once. Maybe I’ll watch it again soon. If you’re going to watch it for the first time, be warned, it is quite possibly the most depressing thing ever filmed.
It is basically the British version of The Day After. It has a build up, nuking, then devastating aftermath. Only it is even worse than the previous movie. The depression is on another level entirely, with kittens slowing dying on screen and old women shitting their guts out. I genuinely wonder what it must have been like watching this on TV in 1984, especially in that climate.
Hell I’d even call Threads kinda scary.
I like its efficiency perhaps above all else. There is romantic stuff in there, but it is ruthlessly culled when the shit goes down. Who has time for that shit when cannibalism is around the corner? Mind you, is the meat you’re eyeing up packed with radiation or not? The few choices for the survivors in Threads are morbid to say the least.
Honorary Mentions:
i) Testament (1983)
This movie was actually given a theatrical release, but only at the last minute. It’s more or less the same deal as The Day After and Threads, only more of a melodrama and a lot more isolated. In the movie, a small town suffers the consequences of neither being in the direct blast range or in one of the surviving areas, thus the survivors must endure the onset of lethal fallout and being cut off from the outside world. This is a slow moving feature but the third act is potent, with no prisoners at all being taken.
ii) Miracle Mile (1988)
Another atomic war movie, where the shit actually goes down on screen, is Miracle Mile. In this movie a man outside a 24 hour diner answers a payphone in Los Angeles, a panicked intelligence officer thinks that he’s through to his father, but has dialled the wrong number. The officer informs the man that nuclear war has began and that Soviet ICBMs are inbound, t-minus 50 minutes. Inside the diner, the man tells the other patrons, nobody taking him seriously, until one of them (with giant 80’s cellphone) has some high level contacts. She calls ’em and the fact that they’re shitting their pants confirms it.
The group try to get the hell out of dodge, but the central character insists on finding his new love interest. And with that, the middle of the movie suffers severely, with giant gaping plot holes and the most incredibly stupid decisions ever taken by a fictional character. The last ten or so minutes are good though, they kind of saved the movie to me.
iii) Jericho (2006)
A lot of people will remember this one, the TV series from 2006. Somewhat similar to ‘Testament’, but with less balls. The first half of Jericho season one was superb TV if you ask me, back when the locals didn’t know what was going on, or who had nuked the USA. There was a real sense of claustrophobia and impending doom, even with the sometimes suffocating melodrama. It wrote itself to death though, like ‘Lost’. The conclusion was patently shit, which meant that the second series was pretty much the same.
Still, the government cynicism and X-Files style paranoia might be up someone’s alley…
4 Comments