Steve Guttenburg escaping a nuclear blast

For some reason, over the past few months and through various “sources”, I rewatched four feature-length doomsday movies.  These movies aren’t like typical disaster flicks - think ”Armageddon”, “I am Legend”, and “The Day After Tomorrow.”   After watching one of those movies I don’t feel that same sense of dread.  Nothing in them inspires me to fight for the cause of world peace. 

The next few articles will review four movies that affected my ideas on war, nuclear weapons, and human nature.  They’re not strict documentaries.  A couple even do lean towards the disaster genre I described above.  But they all have one thing in common - Nuclear War.  And so…

The Day After

For most younger than thirty, the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. may feel just like any other period in world history: the Great Depression, World War I, the Industrial Age, and so forth.  And like magic it was over in 1990.
Today it’s Terrorism, the Environment, or the “Great Recession” as coined by a few financial blogs.  Not to belittle these fears, but none of these looming distastered threatened to wipe-out civilization in a single day like the threat of global thermonuclear war.   Today, there are plenty of these weapons still armed and ready - though not as ready now as they were.

I’d watched “The Day After” when first broadcast in 1983.

Something happened to compel filmmakers to make such movies in the 1980’s.   I haven’t read a good explanation of why it happened- but it did.   Nuclear War had made it’s way to primetime.   Not as a backdrop like it had for many science-fiction films since the 1950s.   These new movies were dramas.   They were meant to have an effect.

The Day When...

Watched by millions The Day After was broadcast primetime on ABC in 1983, and with limited commercial interruptions.    It was later discussed in school classrooms and even affected Ronald Reagan according to diary entries (possibly to the point where he began to seriously pursue arms reduction with the now former Soviet Union.)

The backdrop was Kansas, smack-dab in the center of “a lot of bulls-eyes” as John Lithgow’s character grimly joked.

It follows several characters literally the day before an attack – where already tense relations between the superpowers quickly spiral out of control in Europe. 

In retrospect I found this part of the movie the most effective.  That situations could deteriorate so quickly into war seem unlikely and yet the movie executed these well enough to feel realistic.

Standouts:

• Jason Robards as usual acted finely - in particular the last scene.
  

  Jason Robards surveys the ruins

• The government wouldn’t permit director Nicholas Meyer (of Star Trek II also!) to film inside Air Force bases unless the movie made it clear the Soviets attacked first.  Meyer refused and had to use footage from an older documentary – the question of who started what is left up to the viewer.
• Those mushroom clouds – surreal.  But to a nine year old kid, frightening.
  The “x-ray” heat effect – strange and probably not accurate but still makes its point.  Some people will die instantly.
• The movie used a lot of stock footage otherwise.  Given CGI was in its infancy that’s about all you could expect when recreating a nuclear blast.  Nevertheless people back in 1983 had never seen that kind of devastation before – and yes, it could’ve happened here!

As the final card stated – the events depicted would actually be much worse if they really had happened.  For censorship and dramatic reasons they toned down the devastation. 

 “Fortunately” for us another movie released about a year later cranked things up.   Coming tomorrow.