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A pouporri of Thermonuclear war movies
Several years ago I saw mention of the nuclear apocalypse movie "Threads." I got a copy but didn't watch it until earlier this year. After watching it, I went online to read up on it, and suddenly found myself with several other thermonuclear apocalypse movies on my "to-watch" list. Now I finally am getting around to writing down some thoughts on each one.
In today's batch, a trio of films that take on the daunting task of trying to depict the destruction of thermonuclear warfare on cities and civilization. In chronological order:
The War Game (1965):
The War Game was originally made for BBC TV but never broadcast because the BBC kneeled to government pressure to censor it. The excuse at the time was that it was too horrifying for TV. It did get screened in some theatres, and won the Oscar for best documentary the following year. The establishment's exquisite discomfort with telling the public about just how horrible nuclear war would be comes up again and again when you look at the reception movies like this had when they were released.
The War Game is an odd duck of a film. I think the best description for it is that it's a subjunctive documentary. After showing us a dramatization of something horrible, the narrator will say something like "scenes like this would be commonplace in Britain in the event of a nuclear war." It's shot in a documentary style, even when it's depicting events after the bombs fall. Don't think too hard about the implied circumstances of production, what with a BBC film crew still at their jobs, with working camera gear and unspoiled film stock going around interviewing survivors and filming food rioters instead of trying to stay alive.
In just 46 minutes it shows the lead up to war, the destruction caused by an all out nuclear exchange, and the aftermath of fallout, lack of medical care or supplies, food riots, and harsh martial law, concluding with a hopeless Christmas in a destroyed Britain four months after the bombs fall. For all its age, the film still delivers several powerful gut punches, such as a scene showing police officers shooting burn victims who are too severely wounded to be treated, a scene of children who cannot imagine a future for themselves any longer, and an excruciating, mostly wordless scene where the camera lingers on the faces of traumatized survivors.
All of this from the viewpoint of ordinary Britons, not government or military leaders. Scenes of slaughter are intercut with scrolling text quoting or live interviews with (actors playing as) clergy, policy experts, and other establishment spokespeople, all of whom say (often insane or sociopathic) things inspired by real statements from actual establishment figures. We also get "person on the street" interviews - before the bombs fall, with average Britons who don't know what Strontium-90 and don't think there will be a war, and after they fall with survivors.
At the end, the film identifies its enemy: the conspiracy of silence on the part of the British establishment and the British press regarding the subject of the bomb and the consequences of its use. A silence that the film was not permitted to break in 1965.
Two things really stood out for me on watching it in 2018. One is just how limited the film's imagined consequences of a nuclear war are - it carefully and cautiously sticks throughout to examples taken from Hiroshima or from firebombed German cities. With megaton level bombs (minimum 50 times as powerful as Hiroshima), however, you are no longer obliterating only parts of a city - the entirety of the city and many of its suburbs would lie within the circle of total destruction. So the film's predictions seem woefully over optimistic.
The second is the insane inadequacy of preparations for fallout as recommended by British Civil Defence of the era. The UK government, faced with a nation of urban dwellers who seldom had more than a tiny patch of yard if any, recommended that in the event of an international crisis, Britons construct a lean to against a load bearing wall inside their home out of boards and sandbags to provide extra shielding against high level fallout. The recommendations were based on the assumption that fallout would be outside people's homes and the walls of those homes would not provide enough radiation shielding. This might have been useful advice in a world where most British homes survived the bombs intact and unburnt. It's incredibly stupid advice considering that Britain is an urban nation where most residential homes would have been within the blast radius of a bomb target - with every window of every house broken, with many roofs damaged or torn off, fallout would have infiltrated inside most homes and rendered the lean tos utterly worthless. And not one word of the advice talked about what to do if you lived close enough to downtown that your house would be reduced to burning rubble, along with the city centre.
And that brings up the way civil defence planning during the cold war always seemed to be based on outdated assumptions (assuming a degree of destruction based on atom bombs instead of thermonuclear bombs) and/or lies (the claim by American establishment in the 50' and 60's that fallout was not all that big a deal).
The War Game is worth watching today as a time capsule from the height of the cold war, and as one of the precursors and inspirations for Threads.
The Day After (1983).
My family did not own a television during the 80's, so I never saw President Reagan live, and being relatively uninterested in the news as a teenager, I missed most of his attempts to kill us all by poking the Soviet Union with various verbal and military sticks. I declined an opportunity to watch the Day After when it originally aired - I forget why exactly - so I watched the movie for the first time this year with few preconceptions.
Set in the vicinity of Kansas City, Missouri, which at the time was next door to a wing of 150 Minuteman ICBM missile silos (and thus, under standard MAD doctrine, targeted by at least 300 Soviet warheads), the movie first introduces us to its sprawling cast and (via TV news broadcasts in the background) to a brewing international crisis. Then, inevitably, the missiles are launched, a few minutes later the Soviet bombs fall, and the last half of the film follows the survivors for a few months afterwards.
On the one hand, I can see why it had such a huge impact at the time, and why Reagan, having seen it, was influenced to begin pulling back from the brink that he had been so eager to dance on before. It's an unrelentingly bleak story, and by the end most of the characters are slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The production spent a lot of money on location shooting, on really quite big crowd scenes for a TV production, and on makeup to simulate radiation sickness for a ton of those extras. By the standards of the time, it was a standout TV movie which won awards and sparked a lot of horrified introspection by Reagan and the Pentagon brass when they were given special screenings of it. It remains watchable today, which is more than can be said of most other made for TV movies of the same vintage.
On the other hand, it's very hard to regard it as well today as it was regarded then. Production standards have changed dramatically since the 80's, and it is haunted by all the badness typical of TV movies of the era - especially due to network censorship. The director had to fight hard for six months to preserve his cut of the film, and quite a few little bits were cut here and there to soften the impact.
Despite all the expense poured into it, and all the elaborate makeup attempting to portray radiation sickness, the result feels far less real than the much more cheaply made War Game. In part, I think, because the War Game did not shrink from smearing everyone in mud and dirt, and because the makeup artists for War Game, instead of giving everyone identical looking prosthetics, varied their approach. In the final scene of The Day After, Dr. Oakes (played by professional Hollywood paterfamilias Jason Robards), knowing he is dying of radiation sickness, returns to Kansas City to look for the remains of his wife. He's scrabbling around in the rubble that once was his house in a pure white, freshly bleached shirt with no sign of dirt or sweat on it, and aside from the prosthetic makeup covering his skull, he is completely clean and freshly shaven. There are scenes in which people are dirty, but that bit at the end encapsulates much of what is wrong with The Day After. The scenes of destroyed cities are a little too obviously just set dressing on an intact city (over dependence on location shooting did not help matters). The extras and the stars are always just a little too sanitary, a little too well fed, a little too normal looking. The film tries hard, but can never quite manage to break through the conventions of the American TV movie and show anything that's genuinely frightening or horrible.
Besides being far too clean, The Day After strives for the epic, with large crowds, many scenes packed with extras, and so by necessity most of the film puts the camera at a distance from the characters. Even those scenes where we see someone up close, the goal seems to always be to tell the next bit of the story. Dr Oakes gets the most screen time, but most of it has him in the hospital, doing his job, and seeing him at work treating injured people after the bomb ensures that his emotional response to what has happened is blunted by the fact that he's at work, focused on being a healer, with personal considerations backgrounded.
The War Game, in contrast, gets very close to actors (most of them non-professionals), and lingers there even when they have no lines to say, letting us see their burns, their wounds, the dirt covering them, and also their expressions of agony, of despair, of shell shock. Even though it hardly has any named characters, it feels much more personal, and thus hits much harder, than The Day After.
Another way The Day After pulls its punches has to do with its huge cast and epic scale. In addition to the Oakes family and the Dahlberg family, we meet military personnel (mostly real SAC personnel in scenes cribbed from "First Strike," a 1979 short portraying a sneak Soviet attack on the US), university faculty, and a gaggle of doctors and nurses assisting Dr Oakes in the hospital. It's too many people and too many storylines crammed into too few minutes, with dangling plot threads pointing to even more storylines that got cut. There's not enough screen time for us to get to know anybody really well, aside from Dr Oakes (who, like all patriarchal characters of the era, is more cardboard cutout than human), and again that blunts the emotional impact.
Finally, there were moments of unreality that threw me out of my suspension of disbelief. Two stand out. First, fearing an attack, the farmer Jim Dahlberg orders his son to fill their spare milk cans with water and get them down into the basement while he shovels dirt to cover the basement windows. Inside the basement, we see the ten-ish year old boy *carrying* an *obviously empty* five gallon milk can down the steps, a can that, if it was actually full of water, would weigh fifty pounds or more and be far too heavy for the child to do more than drag it down one step at a time. Second, early on we see that the Dalhberg farm's buildings are less than a hundred meters from an ICBM silo, placing them within the missile field and at ground zero for multiple bombs with overlapping areas of effect. Yet their house not only survives intact and unburnt, but Dahlberg and his son, caught outside when the bombs hit, are not burnt and their clothing does not catch on fire.
I should say something about the music. For a bleak, apocalyptic story of the destruction of civilization, some idiot decided the appropriate theme music would be a proud triumphant tune reminiscent of the musical Oklahoma, a theme that clearly feels good and happy about America's glorious history of western expansion through conquest and genocide. It's Manifest Destiny music, and it does not at all fit with the rest of the film. Histories on the net tell me that there was a full half hour of it scored, but mercifully nearly all of the footage that used this awful, thematically tone-deaf music landed on the cutting room floor.
The film ends with a brief note that a real nuclear war would have much worse consequences than shown in the film, and saying that the creator's hope is to inspire the people and leaders of the various nuclear nations on Earth to find the means to avoid a nuclear conflict.
Whereas The War Game attacked a conspiracy of silence and became a victim of that conspiracy (its censorship was mostly approved of by the press at the time, as shown by the link above), The Day After had a more polyvocal reception. But the far right, still at the time wedded to cold war insanities, roundly condemned it. As always, those who are most fond of war mongering are least able to tolerate being shown, or allow others to be shown, the realities of their blood thirst.
Threads (1984).
This is really the only one of these films that deserves to be called a classic. The War Game feels, today, like a museum exhibit from the early days of the Cold War. The Day After suffers from being an American made for TV movie from an era when made for TV movies were never allowed to be more than bland. Threads, on the other hand, remains a gripping drama and a horrifying experience.
Threads borrows some plot points from The Day After (both involve a planned wedding interrupted by war, both focus on ordinary people in the face of thermonuclear devastation, both show the effects of an attack on a minor city, etc). But where The War Game delivers gut punches, and the Day After wimps out and fears to commit, Threads stabs a dagger into the viewer's vitals. Every place where The Day After smoothed over or prettified something, Threads shows it raw, bleeding, and without compromise.
While some of Threads' plot points might have been borrowed from The Day After, its deepest debt it clearly to The War Game. Its use of voiceover and on screen text to deliver exposition, its focus on (and critique of) Britain's civil defence plans, and a wordless scene of traumatized survivors in the ruins of Sheffield after the bomb, all owe a heavy debt to The War Game.
Like The Day After, Threads devotes an hour to meeting the characters as they live against a backdrop of increasing international tension, and then another hour following those characters after the war obliterates the world they knew. Instead of The Day After's sprawling cast, however, Threads has a much tighter focus. There's the central character, Ruth, who is pregnant, her boyfriend and father of her unborn child Jimmy; Ruth's family, Jimmy's family, and finally the mayor and his emergency city counsel, tasked, as the international crisis deepens, with keeping local government going in the event of a war. Jimmy is never seen again after the bombs fall, his family dies from blast, burns, and fallout, Ruth's family is killed by looters, and Sheffield's emergency city council, trapped for months beneath the rubble of City Hall, die from lack of food and water. The last third of the film follows the post-war life of Ruth and her daughter in a Britain reduced to medieval population levels and governed by a harsh and violent police state. While The Day After and The War Game both end a few months after the bombs fall, Threads follows Ruth and her daughter for fourteen years.
Actually I get the feeling that the producers took extensive notes while watching The Day After and stored them in a folder marked "what not to do."
The thesis of Threads is encapsulated in its title: that urban society depends for its existence on a vast web of interconnected dependencies, and a nuclear war would destroy the threads of those interconnections, making continued existence above a rural medieval level impossible. Along the way, Threads also takes pot shots at the "Protect and Survive" civil defence leaflet and series of TV PSAs that the British government had commissioned in case a war seemed likely and which had been widely criticized when they leaked in 1980.
Threads's documentary approach to exposition enables it to avoid the kind of show-stopping infodumps that infect parts of The Day After. Another way that Threads breaks with the mimetic approach to drama are occasional scenes made up of still black and white photos, mixing stills of their actors and staged images with file photos of real burn victims, real famine victims and concentration camp survivors, and so on. It helps them avoid the problem of trying to depict privation and near fatal illness with well-fed, healthy actors.
From the scene where Ruth staggers through the ruins of Sheffield looking for her boyfriend, and finds only traumatized, shell shocked survivors (ending at a blood soaked hospital where doctors amputate limbs without anaesthetic), to the scene where she gives birth all alone in a barn and, lacking a knife, chews through the umbilical cord, Threads never flinches from showing devastatingly horrible things. It remains a riveting film, and an emotionally devastating one.
Next time, some other nuclear holocaust films (and a book or two) that I watched or at least checked out that don't try to depict the destruction of nuclear war directly.
In today's batch, a trio of films that take on the daunting task of trying to depict the destruction of thermonuclear warfare on cities and civilization. In chronological order:
The War Game (1965):
The War Game was originally made for BBC TV but never broadcast because the BBC kneeled to government pressure to censor it. The excuse at the time was that it was too horrifying for TV. It did get screened in some theatres, and won the Oscar for best documentary the following year. The establishment's exquisite discomfort with telling the public about just how horrible nuclear war would be comes up again and again when you look at the reception movies like this had when they were released.
The War Game is an odd duck of a film. I think the best description for it is that it's a subjunctive documentary. After showing us a dramatization of something horrible, the narrator will say something like "scenes like this would be commonplace in Britain in the event of a nuclear war." It's shot in a documentary style, even when it's depicting events after the bombs fall. Don't think too hard about the implied circumstances of production, what with a BBC film crew still at their jobs, with working camera gear and unspoiled film stock going around interviewing survivors and filming food rioters instead of trying to stay alive.
In just 46 minutes it shows the lead up to war, the destruction caused by an all out nuclear exchange, and the aftermath of fallout, lack of medical care or supplies, food riots, and harsh martial law, concluding with a hopeless Christmas in a destroyed Britain four months after the bombs fall. For all its age, the film still delivers several powerful gut punches, such as a scene showing police officers shooting burn victims who are too severely wounded to be treated, a scene of children who cannot imagine a future for themselves any longer, and an excruciating, mostly wordless scene where the camera lingers on the faces of traumatized survivors.
All of this from the viewpoint of ordinary Britons, not government or military leaders. Scenes of slaughter are intercut with scrolling text quoting or live interviews with (actors playing as) clergy, policy experts, and other establishment spokespeople, all of whom say (often insane or sociopathic) things inspired by real statements from actual establishment figures. We also get "person on the street" interviews - before the bombs fall, with average Britons who don't know what Strontium-90 and don't think there will be a war, and after they fall with survivors.
At the end, the film identifies its enemy: the conspiracy of silence on the part of the British establishment and the British press regarding the subject of the bomb and the consequences of its use. A silence that the film was not permitted to break in 1965.
Two things really stood out for me on watching it in 2018. One is just how limited the film's imagined consequences of a nuclear war are - it carefully and cautiously sticks throughout to examples taken from Hiroshima or from firebombed German cities. With megaton level bombs (minimum 50 times as powerful as Hiroshima), however, you are no longer obliterating only parts of a city - the entirety of the city and many of its suburbs would lie within the circle of total destruction. So the film's predictions seem woefully over optimistic.
The second is the insane inadequacy of preparations for fallout as recommended by British Civil Defence of the era. The UK government, faced with a nation of urban dwellers who seldom had more than a tiny patch of yard if any, recommended that in the event of an international crisis, Britons construct a lean to against a load bearing wall inside their home out of boards and sandbags to provide extra shielding against high level fallout. The recommendations were based on the assumption that fallout would be outside people's homes and the walls of those homes would not provide enough radiation shielding. This might have been useful advice in a world where most British homes survived the bombs intact and unburnt. It's incredibly stupid advice considering that Britain is an urban nation where most residential homes would have been within the blast radius of a bomb target - with every window of every house broken, with many roofs damaged or torn off, fallout would have infiltrated inside most homes and rendered the lean tos utterly worthless. And not one word of the advice talked about what to do if you lived close enough to downtown that your house would be reduced to burning rubble, along with the city centre.
And that brings up the way civil defence planning during the cold war always seemed to be based on outdated assumptions (assuming a degree of destruction based on atom bombs instead of thermonuclear bombs) and/or lies (the claim by American establishment in the 50' and 60's that fallout was not all that big a deal).
The War Game is worth watching today as a time capsule from the height of the cold war, and as one of the precursors and inspirations for Threads.
The Day After (1983).
My family did not own a television during the 80's, so I never saw President Reagan live, and being relatively uninterested in the news as a teenager, I missed most of his attempts to kill us all by poking the Soviet Union with various verbal and military sticks. I declined an opportunity to watch the Day After when it originally aired - I forget why exactly - so I watched the movie for the first time this year with few preconceptions.
Set in the vicinity of Kansas City, Missouri, which at the time was next door to a wing of 150 Minuteman ICBM missile silos (and thus, under standard MAD doctrine, targeted by at least 300 Soviet warheads), the movie first introduces us to its sprawling cast and (via TV news broadcasts in the background) to a brewing international crisis. Then, inevitably, the missiles are launched, a few minutes later the Soviet bombs fall, and the last half of the film follows the survivors for a few months afterwards.
On the one hand, I can see why it had such a huge impact at the time, and why Reagan, having seen it, was influenced to begin pulling back from the brink that he had been so eager to dance on before. It's an unrelentingly bleak story, and by the end most of the characters are slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The production spent a lot of money on location shooting, on really quite big crowd scenes for a TV production, and on makeup to simulate radiation sickness for a ton of those extras. By the standards of the time, it was a standout TV movie which won awards and sparked a lot of horrified introspection by Reagan and the Pentagon brass when they were given special screenings of it. It remains watchable today, which is more than can be said of most other made for TV movies of the same vintage.
On the other hand, it's very hard to regard it as well today as it was regarded then. Production standards have changed dramatically since the 80's, and it is haunted by all the badness typical of TV movies of the era - especially due to network censorship. The director had to fight hard for six months to preserve his cut of the film, and quite a few little bits were cut here and there to soften the impact.
Despite all the expense poured into it, and all the elaborate makeup attempting to portray radiation sickness, the result feels far less real than the much more cheaply made War Game. In part, I think, because the War Game did not shrink from smearing everyone in mud and dirt, and because the makeup artists for War Game, instead of giving everyone identical looking prosthetics, varied their approach. In the final scene of The Day After, Dr. Oakes (played by professional Hollywood paterfamilias Jason Robards), knowing he is dying of radiation sickness, returns to Kansas City to look for the remains of his wife. He's scrabbling around in the rubble that once was his house in a pure white, freshly bleached shirt with no sign of dirt or sweat on it, and aside from the prosthetic makeup covering his skull, he is completely clean and freshly shaven. There are scenes in which people are dirty, but that bit at the end encapsulates much of what is wrong with The Day After. The scenes of destroyed cities are a little too obviously just set dressing on an intact city (over dependence on location shooting did not help matters). The extras and the stars are always just a little too sanitary, a little too well fed, a little too normal looking. The film tries hard, but can never quite manage to break through the conventions of the American TV movie and show anything that's genuinely frightening or horrible.
Besides being far too clean, The Day After strives for the epic, with large crowds, many scenes packed with extras, and so by necessity most of the film puts the camera at a distance from the characters. Even those scenes where we see someone up close, the goal seems to always be to tell the next bit of the story. Dr Oakes gets the most screen time, but most of it has him in the hospital, doing his job, and seeing him at work treating injured people after the bomb ensures that his emotional response to what has happened is blunted by the fact that he's at work, focused on being a healer, with personal considerations backgrounded.
The War Game, in contrast, gets very close to actors (most of them non-professionals), and lingers there even when they have no lines to say, letting us see their burns, their wounds, the dirt covering them, and also their expressions of agony, of despair, of shell shock. Even though it hardly has any named characters, it feels much more personal, and thus hits much harder, than The Day After.
Another way The Day After pulls its punches has to do with its huge cast and epic scale. In addition to the Oakes family and the Dahlberg family, we meet military personnel (mostly real SAC personnel in scenes cribbed from "First Strike," a 1979 short portraying a sneak Soviet attack on the US), university faculty, and a gaggle of doctors and nurses assisting Dr Oakes in the hospital. It's too many people and too many storylines crammed into too few minutes, with dangling plot threads pointing to even more storylines that got cut. There's not enough screen time for us to get to know anybody really well, aside from Dr Oakes (who, like all patriarchal characters of the era, is more cardboard cutout than human), and again that blunts the emotional impact.
Finally, there were moments of unreality that threw me out of my suspension of disbelief. Two stand out. First, fearing an attack, the farmer Jim Dahlberg orders his son to fill their spare milk cans with water and get them down into the basement while he shovels dirt to cover the basement windows. Inside the basement, we see the ten-ish year old boy *carrying* an *obviously empty* five gallon milk can down the steps, a can that, if it was actually full of water, would weigh fifty pounds or more and be far too heavy for the child to do more than drag it down one step at a time. Second, early on we see that the Dalhberg farm's buildings are less than a hundred meters from an ICBM silo, placing them within the missile field and at ground zero for multiple bombs with overlapping areas of effect. Yet their house not only survives intact and unburnt, but Dahlberg and his son, caught outside when the bombs hit, are not burnt and their clothing does not catch on fire.
I should say something about the music. For a bleak, apocalyptic story of the destruction of civilization, some idiot decided the appropriate theme music would be a proud triumphant tune reminiscent of the musical Oklahoma, a theme that clearly feels good and happy about America's glorious history of western expansion through conquest and genocide. It's Manifest Destiny music, and it does not at all fit with the rest of the film. Histories on the net tell me that there was a full half hour of it scored, but mercifully nearly all of the footage that used this awful, thematically tone-deaf music landed on the cutting room floor.
The film ends with a brief note that a real nuclear war would have much worse consequences than shown in the film, and saying that the creator's hope is to inspire the people and leaders of the various nuclear nations on Earth to find the means to avoid a nuclear conflict.
Whereas The War Game attacked a conspiracy of silence and became a victim of that conspiracy (its censorship was mostly approved of by the press at the time, as shown by the link above), The Day After had a more polyvocal reception. But the far right, still at the time wedded to cold war insanities, roundly condemned it. As always, those who are most fond of war mongering are least able to tolerate being shown, or allow others to be shown, the realities of their blood thirst.
Threads (1984).
This is really the only one of these films that deserves to be called a classic. The War Game feels, today, like a museum exhibit from the early days of the Cold War. The Day After suffers from being an American made for TV movie from an era when made for TV movies were never allowed to be more than bland. Threads, on the other hand, remains a gripping drama and a horrifying experience.
Threads borrows some plot points from The Day After (both involve a planned wedding interrupted by war, both focus on ordinary people in the face of thermonuclear devastation, both show the effects of an attack on a minor city, etc). But where The War Game delivers gut punches, and the Day After wimps out and fears to commit, Threads stabs a dagger into the viewer's vitals. Every place where The Day After smoothed over or prettified something, Threads shows it raw, bleeding, and without compromise.
While some of Threads' plot points might have been borrowed from The Day After, its deepest debt it clearly to The War Game. Its use of voiceover and on screen text to deliver exposition, its focus on (and critique of) Britain's civil defence plans, and a wordless scene of traumatized survivors in the ruins of Sheffield after the bomb, all owe a heavy debt to The War Game.
Like The Day After, Threads devotes an hour to meeting the characters as they live against a backdrop of increasing international tension, and then another hour following those characters after the war obliterates the world they knew. Instead of The Day After's sprawling cast, however, Threads has a much tighter focus. There's the central character, Ruth, who is pregnant, her boyfriend and father of her unborn child Jimmy; Ruth's family, Jimmy's family, and finally the mayor and his emergency city counsel, tasked, as the international crisis deepens, with keeping local government going in the event of a war. Jimmy is never seen again after the bombs fall, his family dies from blast, burns, and fallout, Ruth's family is killed by looters, and Sheffield's emergency city council, trapped for months beneath the rubble of City Hall, die from lack of food and water. The last third of the film follows the post-war life of Ruth and her daughter in a Britain reduced to medieval population levels and governed by a harsh and violent police state. While The Day After and The War Game both end a few months after the bombs fall, Threads follows Ruth and her daughter for fourteen years.
Actually I get the feeling that the producers took extensive notes while watching The Day After and stored them in a folder marked "what not to do."
The thesis of Threads is encapsulated in its title: that urban society depends for its existence on a vast web of interconnected dependencies, and a nuclear war would destroy the threads of those interconnections, making continued existence above a rural medieval level impossible. Along the way, Threads also takes pot shots at the "Protect and Survive" civil defence leaflet and series of TV PSAs that the British government had commissioned in case a war seemed likely and which had been widely criticized when they leaked in 1980.
Threads's documentary approach to exposition enables it to avoid the kind of show-stopping infodumps that infect parts of The Day After. Another way that Threads breaks with the mimetic approach to drama are occasional scenes made up of still black and white photos, mixing stills of their actors and staged images with file photos of real burn victims, real famine victims and concentration camp survivors, and so on. It helps them avoid the problem of trying to depict privation and near fatal illness with well-fed, healthy actors.
From the scene where Ruth staggers through the ruins of Sheffield looking for her boyfriend, and finds only traumatized, shell shocked survivors (ending at a blood soaked hospital where doctors amputate limbs without anaesthetic), to the scene where she gives birth all alone in a barn and, lacking a knife, chews through the umbilical cord, Threads never flinches from showing devastatingly horrible things. It remains a riveting film, and an emotionally devastating one.
Next time, some other nuclear holocaust films (and a book or two) that I watched or at least checked out that don't try to depict the destruction of nuclear war directly.