More thermonuclear war movies
Oct. 30th, 2018 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungAs best I can tell, there have been extremely few movies that show the actual apocalypse of nuclear war. The War Game, The Day After, and Threads appear to be it. I'm going to invent a genre here and call them movies of calamity, which combines bits of tragedy and terror on a huge scale. They aren't disaster movies because they don't provide the satisfaction of seeing the Worthy Protagonists survive and prevail while everyone unworthy perishes - instead everyone suffers, worthy and unworthy alike. They aren't horror movies because the terror component does not have the pleasing feeling of being a little bit frightened while knowing that you are actually perfectly safe. Instead they seek to make you feel quite unsafe.
And the lack of pleasure, the lack of feeling safe and smugly superior to the hapless victims on the screen, is probably why nobody has made more of them. The closest I could find were some thermonuclear tragedies: Testament and When the Wind Blows.
Testament (1983)
Carol Wetherly and her three children are at home when news of the bombs going off airs on TV, followed by an emergency broadcast system alert, seconds before the power fails. The Wetherlys live in a small suburban community that's far enough from San Francisco that there is no damage whatsoever from the bombs. Carol's husband was in town on business that day, and is never seen again. The town continues as best it can without power or fuel or new supplies of food, as people start dying from radiation sickness one by one, including two of Carol's children. The town is called Hamlin, and the school play (still put on after the bombs fall despite everything) is "the Pied Piper of Hamlin" - a heavy handed signal that the movie is more akin to allegory than mimetic fiction. As a tragic allegory, it's a very moving performance by Jane Alexander as Carol (who was nominated for an Oscar).
As a story, it doesn't make a single lick of sense. When the bombs go off, the world glares to white for a few seconds, even though they are way too far from the city to have any kind of line of sight on the fireball. Nobody in the town appears to have ever heard of the concept of a fallout shelter - they all continue to blithely move about in the days after the attack instead of trying to minimize their exposure. No other towns appear to exist neighbouring their own - the only contact with the outside world is by ham radio, and only with people who are very far away. And there's no such thing as farms anywhere nearby, the concept that they could go out of their town in search of food and supplies, or try to salvage things from nearby places with no survivors is never touched on. The townsfolk are utterly dependant on batteries - nobody rigs up anything like a windmill to generate power, nobody has a portable generator, and nobody thinks to go around and drain the fuel from unused cars (near the end Carol and her son come close to suicide, and the method they choose, before thinking better of it, is CO poisoning from running their car in their garage - so months after the attack, their unused car still has gas in it).
And finally, the worst thing about this film is how Carol has no existence outside her role as mother. One gets the sense that the real disaster the family faces is the loss of Carol's husband, and the real hero of the film is her elder son, who does his best to step into the paterfamilias role not just for their family but for the entire town (he becomes the messenger for the town, riding his bike everywhere, and is described by Carol in a voiceover as "tireless"). Like I said, it's a very Reagan-era film.
"When the Wind Blows" (1986)
This animated feature film faithfully adapts a 1982 British graphic novel by Raymond Briggs. It follows the lives of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, two elderly, poorly educated lower class country people who are bewildered by the modern world. When war looms, Jim does his best to follow government instructions to build a fallout shelter within his home. And when the bombs fall, his home is far enough out in the country that the only damage is some broken windows. But neither of them actually understand what fallout is or why it is dangerous, and the government civil defence literature does not explain it in a way they can understand. Lack of understanding combined with criminally bad government advice leads to their deaths from radiation sickness.
While Testament appears to have been made with nearly zero research, Briggs did his homework and the details of blast damage and radiation sickness are accurate. The story is first and foremost an evisceration of the British Government's criminally stupid civil defence literature and civil defence preparations. In this, it joins several BBC documentaries from the 80's that took the government to task for its civil defence policies, including the 1980 Panorama episode If the Bomb Drops and the 1982 Q.E.D. episode A guide to Armageddon.
While continential nations were investing in purpose built public fallout shelters and/or requiring all new homes to include fully equipped fallout shelters in their basements, Britain's approach from the 60's through to the end of the cold war was based on waiting until a severe international crisis, and then telling Britons to create makeshift fallout shelters inside their homes, using doors and other lumber cannibalized from their living space. The assumption was that there would be weeks of build up during which the government would have time to broadcast PSAs telling people what to do, and the civilian population would have time to prepare shelter rooms within their homes and stock them with food and water. Aside from the huge weakness that such a plan became useless if a crisis escalated within days rather than weeks, it also pretty much wrote off all the people living within five or six miles of a target whose houses would be pulverized and burned.
Besides reducing the cost to the government, this strategy seems to have been more designed to suppress internal refugees (over and over again the PSAs and accompanying pamphlets told Britons that they were safest in their homes and they should stay there) than to actually protect people from dying in a war.
While When the Wind Blows is a very moving film, I had trouble watching it because while the author and film makers clearly have a deep affection for the Bloggs, I could not bring myself to like them anywhere near as much - their extreme media unsavvyness felt like something from an extinct and very alien world, and their old world sexism was offputting. I may be too young to have met the kind of people that they represent.
Moving away from calamities and tragedies, another major genre in the realm of thermonuclear war movies are the war films - productions where the focus is on the decision by leaders and generals to push the button, and then on the officers and enlisted men who carry out their orders to drop the bomb. Hollywood of course has a natural tendency to sycophantically focus on establishment leaders and adopt their point of view, so most of these films are worthless exercises in fellating the Pentagon and the establishment (Hollywood has always had a hard on for the military). The biggest exception is of course Doctor Strangelove (1964), which I won't address directly, but there are two other movies in the same theme that I watched or tried to watch.
Fail Safe (1964)
Kubrick filed a plagiarism lawsuit against Fail Safe, thereby keeping it out of theatres until his own Dr. Strangelove was released. There are superficial similarities between the two movies, and a boatload of parallels that Kubrick probably saw as red flags, but they could not be more different in tone or outlook. Dr Strangelove takes the insanity of cold war brinksmanship and mutually assured destruction, and turns it into black comedy. It calls the establishment on the sociopathy of its view of the bomb and the cold war, and takes the piss out of said views. Fail Safe accepts the establishment view, accepts the insanity as sane, lives inside that world, and then makes us watch the nightmare consequences play out in a tense drama.
The movie is an extremely faithful adaptation of the novel "Fail Safe" by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. America's early warning system throws an alert over an unidentified blip, as it does a few times every month. Before the alert is resolved as a false alarm, an electronic malfunction causes one bomber group to get the go ahead to attack. The film alternates between one of the bomber crews, a roomful of generals and policy makers in the Pentagon, a roomful of communications techs and officers at SAC headquarters, and a tiny room deep under the White House where the President and his Russian translator try to persuade the Soviet premier that it's all a big mistake, please don't launch all your bombs at us.
Fail Safe has one more setting than Dr Strangelove, and features two scenes shot on location that break out of the confines of pentagon bunkers, military bases, and bomber cockpits (unlike Doctor Strangelove), but oddly it feels *more* confined and claustrophobic than Dr Strangelove. At times you get the feeling that the production wanted to be a filmed play rather than a Hollywood production (much later the novel was in fact adapted into a play). The tight, confined feeling of the sets and cinematography seems a deliberate choice to make us feel how the cold warriors it depicts are all blinkered and trapped inside their tiny mental boxes.
Unlike Strangelove, Fail Safe has no antagonists, no villains or madmen. Its heroes struggle on the one hand against a malfunction in a system so complex that no one realizes it's gone haywire until it's too late, and on the other hand against the mistrust and paranoid suspicion between the USSR and the US that created the situation in the first place. They fail to fix the malfunction. They succeed in overcoming the paranoid suspicion, but at terrible cost.
It's a thoughtful, serious film that sadly asks its thoughtful, serious questions without interrogating the paranoid insanity of the Cold War frame of reference. If only it could have adopted Kubrick's scepticism towards the Establishment wisdom. Nevertheless, it's a neglected classic that was unfairly overshadowed and shoved out of the spotlight by Kubrick's comic take on the same theme.
By Dawn's Early Light (1990)
This made for HBO movie was produced before the fall of the Berlin wall but aired afterward. Dated from even before it aired, it has aged quite poorly, but even as an exercise in alternative history, I found it unwatchable except on fast forward. The plot is simple enough - hardline factions within the USSR steal a nuclear weapon and launch it from the vicinity of a NATO base in Turkey against a Russian city. Its detonation sets off an automated but limited retaliatory strike against the White House, Pentagon, and SAC headquarters. Russia's premier assures the president that a full scale attack will only take place if the US launches an all out attack in response. In the resulting chaos, the President, who is injured when his helicopter crashes, is assumed dead and command devolves onto a minor cabinet official, who proceeds to make very poor choices, egged on by an anti-communist military advisor. Only at the last minute does the President manage to get in touch with the Looking Glass airborne command post (whose commander is James Earl Jones because stunt casting) and call off an all out attack.
So it's basically a basket of plot points recycled from Doctor Strangelove (Russia having an unstoppable, automated response to a single bomb going off) and Fail Safe (the president and the premier trying to find a way to avoid escalation after a mistake), tossed in the blender and then half baked into a forgettable thriller. The thing that utterly ruins it are the scenes aboard a B-52 bomber. The bomber does nothing essential to the plot and appears to be there simply because Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe both featured scenes aboard a bomber. The pilot and (female) copilot of the bomber are romantically involved, so every scene featuring them is not only a distraction from the main events, it features badly written 80's style "romantic tension between coworkers" drivel. How this piece of dreck got onto a list of noteworthy nuclear war films is beyond me.
The single biggest genre of nuclear apocalypse movies is of course the post-apocalypse story. Atomic war is just a background plot point to explain why the world has become a lawless wasteland where might makes right and the survivors are in a constant Hobbesean struggle to not become the prey of bullies who have more guns than they do. Hollywood has always loved Westerns and these movies become excuses to produce yet another Western without going to the dried out well of the 1880's yet again. I checked out one and a half examples that made it onto lists of noteworthy nuclear apocalypse movies.
Panic in Year Zero! (1962)
The oldest nuclear war film I've watched, it comes from an era when American fears focused on bombers rather than ICBMs, which means (since bombers can be intercepted and shot down) it was actually possible to legitimately imagine an all out war that only destroys some major cities and some military targets instead of all of them.
The film is based (without acknowledgement) on the novella "Lot" by Ward Moore. While I haven't read it, there are reviews of it on the web (above and here). In brief, a suburban white American family flees LA when war begins, but the father, Mr. Jimmon, is a middle aged white middle class man who runs on resentments, hating his job, his wife, his children, and looking down upon them all as whiny, soft, irrational people who lack his survival instincts and his laser focus on being psychologically and materially prepared to survive the post war world. Only his daughter, who takes after him (whereas his sons are like their mother), meets with his approval. After many pages in which the characters are trapped in a traffic jam of cars fleeing LA, with the father seething in the driver's seat, they finally reach a gas station, where the father abandons his "parasitic" family and heads off into the wilderness with his like-minded daughter. Jimmon is, crucially, depicted as a sociopath rather than some kind of Randian-inspired prepper role model.
So, naturally, the film makers turned the story into a movie by keeping the father's outlook on life but making him into the hero. Harry and Ann Baldwin with their teenage children Rick and Karen set out on a fishing trip. Los Angeles is destroyed shortly after they leave it - they see flashes of light coming from behind them, and then spot the mushroom cloud. Another sign of how early this movie is - it assumes that major civilian targets would be hit with multiple bombs, as would be the case in the atomic era, instead of just a single megaton-class warhead, as in the thermonuclear era.
Like the source material, the first half of the film is obsessed with traffic, interspersing scenes that advance the plot with endless shots of cars travelling very fast on narrow two lane highways. The Baldwins turn around to head back to LA (Ann is particularly worried about her mother) but Harry thinks better of it when a survivor in his dressing gown at a gas station tells them how thoroughly the city has been destroyed. The survivor then slugs the station attendant and drives off without paying for his gas. Harry makes no effort to intervene, explaining to the attendant that his mother didn't raise him to be a hero.
The post-apocalyptic Hobbesian war of all against all is on, and Harry knows exactly what to do - he drives to a back road town that hasn't yet heard of the bombings, and buys a ton of groceries from the grocery store, then a ton of supplies from the hardware store. But he doesn't have enough cash to pay for a bunch of rifles and handguns, so he steals them from the store owner at gunpoint.
Ann lacks Harry's outlook on survival, and is deeply shocked by his sudden criminal behaviour. Instead of abandoning her as in the novella, Harry merely mansplains to her over several conversations that for the next several weeks, they need to focus on survival until civilization "gets civilized again" and the rule of law returns. Survivors from the bombed cities are spreading out across the countryside. "Every footpath will be crawling with men saying 'no matter what I am going to live.' That's what I'm saying too. My family must survive."
To her protest that "intelligent people don't just turn their backs on the rest of the world," he mansplains that that is exactly what smart people will be doing under the current circumstances. When she prevents Rick from killing a juvenile delinquent who is holding a gun on Harry, Harry berates her. Rick is thrilled by the experience of shooting at the mugger, but Harry berates him too - Rick must hate being forced to use the gun, for "a big piece of civilization is gone and your mother wants to save what's left -- and so do I."
Harry's actions continue to belie his words, however. He punches out a gas station attendant rather than pay inflated prices for gas. Coming upon a roadblock where a small town has cordoned off the road, Harry approaches with his handgun drawn and pointed at a spokesperson who approaches him unarmed. Instead of asking the townspeople if there's some way they can escort him past their town, he runs through their roadblock at high speed while his son fires a warning shot at them. They fire back - only protagonist plot protection keeps Harry's family uninjured. And near the end of their journey, Harry sets fire to a puddle of gasoline in the middle of the jam packed freeway to create a break in the traffic for him to cross, setting several people's vehicles on fire.
For all of Harry's pontificating about the destruction of civilization, the movie fails to depict a degree of chaos that justifies his behaviour. The power grid does not fail, the telephone system still works, fallout is mentioned a few times but it doesn't seem to claim any victims and nobody bothers staying under cover out of fear of it. We see no injured survivors, no signs of destruction or devastation, and people continue to treat paper dollars as having value. Washington DC escapes being bombed so the federal government continues to exist.
The movie makers want us to side with Harry, but they really fail to make their point. Aside from a single gang of three hoodlums that the Baldwins encounter on the road and again in the fishing area where Harry plans to hide out (the world of this movie is very small, probably due to a miniscule budget), the only actual signs of order breaking down are in the pathological fears Harry harbours that cause him to go around pointing his gun at every stranger he meets, friendly or unfriendly, and cause him to act like a total dick towards Marilyn, a young woman the gang is treating as a sex slave ("get dressed and get out", he barks at her once they free her from the gang - when Rick shows compassion and invites her to stay with them, it is the only time in the film that Harry's authority is questioned in any way).
Panic in Year Zero only makes sense if you accept the premise of the filmmakers that the potential for disorder, chaos, rape and murder are always there just under the surface, and that the slightest disruption to daily life will cause most people to suddenly for no reason start acting like violent sociopaths.
Despite all the evidence that in real life disasters people act rather better towards each other than they do in ordinary times, and that the natural tendency of people and communities experiencing calamity is to come together and help one other, the meme that disaster causes people to start acting like sociopaths is one that will not die in Hollywood. Hollywood is nothing if not a tool of the establishment, and thus it projects the fears and paranoia of the wealthy (who spend a lot of time worrying that one day the poor will treat them as they have been treating the poor) upon the world.
Miracle Mile (1988)
Imagine that the script for a romantic comedy about an awkward nerdy boy who meets and falls in love with a nerdy girl had a collision on the subway with a script about a boy learning, accidentally, that an all out nuclear attack will be be launched against Russia, with the inevitable consequence of a counter attack, and the world as he knows it will therefore end in 90 minutes. As word of the impending attack spreads from one person to a half dozen to the entire city, chaos, panic, and disorder break out, hugely complicating the boy's attempts to reunite with his girl and wrangle transportation for them both out of town before the bombs drop. In the end, the young couple die within yards of the place they first met the day before when the bomb blast crashes their helicopter.
Yep, this is another "disaster strips away the thin veneer of civilization" movie, with the decent into chaos happening this time before the bombs drop instead or after. I watched the first twenty minutes and the last ten and did not feel I missed anything of real interest in doing so.
And finally, we have another really crappy movie that somehow got onto lists of important nuclear holocaust movies for God knows what reason:
Special Bulletin (1983)
A group of terrorists seize a boat in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. They have a nuclear bomb, which they threaten to detonate if their demands are not met. In the end, they are captured or killed, but the specialists brought in to disarm the bomb fail and it detonates, destroying the city. That simple synopsis leaves out two of the things that made the film aggressively unwatchable for me.
First, the pretence that the entire made for TV movie is found footage captured from the broadcasts of one of the TV networks as it airs special news updates about the crisis. Since the narrative would have been woefully incomplete without showing the story of the terrorists, the network strings a cable into the boat and there is the pretence that the terrorists allowed TV journalists to join them on the boat to interview them and be a fly on the wall while they made their demands. Which is utterly ludicrous on its face - all activists everywhere know that you don't allow the press unrestricted access to your if you want to control your narrative and get your message out the the world undistorted.
The second thing that makes this film not just a crappy forgettable made for TV movie but a feculent and disgusting piece of right wing propaganda is the identity of the terrorists -- they are nuclear disarmament activists who are demanding that the US government give them the arming triggers to the entire US nuclear arsenal stored at the naval base in Charleston. So in the bullshit world depicted in this film, the terrorists, who at the start of the movie are battling local law enforcement with automatic weapons, are pacifists and peaceniks. Which I guess is part and parcel of TV's long history (as the tool and lapdog of the centre-right establishment) of demonizing left wing activists. But still, the ludicrous nature of this particular slander is just too ridiculous for words and make the movie too fucking stupid to watch.
And the lack of pleasure, the lack of feeling safe and smugly superior to the hapless victims on the screen, is probably why nobody has made more of them. The closest I could find were some thermonuclear tragedies: Testament and When the Wind Blows.
Testament (1983)
Carol Wetherly and her three children are at home when news of the bombs going off airs on TV, followed by an emergency broadcast system alert, seconds before the power fails. The Wetherlys live in a small suburban community that's far enough from San Francisco that there is no damage whatsoever from the bombs. Carol's husband was in town on business that day, and is never seen again. The town continues as best it can without power or fuel or new supplies of food, as people start dying from radiation sickness one by one, including two of Carol's children. The town is called Hamlin, and the school play (still put on after the bombs fall despite everything) is "the Pied Piper of Hamlin" - a heavy handed signal that the movie is more akin to allegory than mimetic fiction. As a tragic allegory, it's a very moving performance by Jane Alexander as Carol (who was nominated for an Oscar).
As a story, it doesn't make a single lick of sense. When the bombs go off, the world glares to white for a few seconds, even though they are way too far from the city to have any kind of line of sight on the fireball. Nobody in the town appears to have ever heard of the concept of a fallout shelter - they all continue to blithely move about in the days after the attack instead of trying to minimize their exposure. No other towns appear to exist neighbouring their own - the only contact with the outside world is by ham radio, and only with people who are very far away. And there's no such thing as farms anywhere nearby, the concept that they could go out of their town in search of food and supplies, or try to salvage things from nearby places with no survivors is never touched on. The townsfolk are utterly dependant on batteries - nobody rigs up anything like a windmill to generate power, nobody has a portable generator, and nobody thinks to go around and drain the fuel from unused cars (near the end Carol and her son come close to suicide, and the method they choose, before thinking better of it, is CO poisoning from running their car in their garage - so months after the attack, their unused car still has gas in it).
And finally, the worst thing about this film is how Carol has no existence outside her role as mother. One gets the sense that the real disaster the family faces is the loss of Carol's husband, and the real hero of the film is her elder son, who does his best to step into the paterfamilias role not just for their family but for the entire town (he becomes the messenger for the town, riding his bike everywhere, and is described by Carol in a voiceover as "tireless"). Like I said, it's a very Reagan-era film.
"When the Wind Blows" (1986)
This animated feature film faithfully adapts a 1982 British graphic novel by Raymond Briggs. It follows the lives of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, two elderly, poorly educated lower class country people who are bewildered by the modern world. When war looms, Jim does his best to follow government instructions to build a fallout shelter within his home. And when the bombs fall, his home is far enough out in the country that the only damage is some broken windows. But neither of them actually understand what fallout is or why it is dangerous, and the government civil defence literature does not explain it in a way they can understand. Lack of understanding combined with criminally bad government advice leads to their deaths from radiation sickness.
While Testament appears to have been made with nearly zero research, Briggs did his homework and the details of blast damage and radiation sickness are accurate. The story is first and foremost an evisceration of the British Government's criminally stupid civil defence literature and civil defence preparations. In this, it joins several BBC documentaries from the 80's that took the government to task for its civil defence policies, including the 1980 Panorama episode If the Bomb Drops and the 1982 Q.E.D. episode A guide to Armageddon.
While continential nations were investing in purpose built public fallout shelters and/or requiring all new homes to include fully equipped fallout shelters in their basements, Britain's approach from the 60's through to the end of the cold war was based on waiting until a severe international crisis, and then telling Britons to create makeshift fallout shelters inside their homes, using doors and other lumber cannibalized from their living space. The assumption was that there would be weeks of build up during which the government would have time to broadcast PSAs telling people what to do, and the civilian population would have time to prepare shelter rooms within their homes and stock them with food and water. Aside from the huge weakness that such a plan became useless if a crisis escalated within days rather than weeks, it also pretty much wrote off all the people living within five or six miles of a target whose houses would be pulverized and burned.
Besides reducing the cost to the government, this strategy seems to have been more designed to suppress internal refugees (over and over again the PSAs and accompanying pamphlets told Britons that they were safest in their homes and they should stay there) than to actually protect people from dying in a war.
While When the Wind Blows is a very moving film, I had trouble watching it because while the author and film makers clearly have a deep affection for the Bloggs, I could not bring myself to like them anywhere near as much - their extreme media unsavvyness felt like something from an extinct and very alien world, and their old world sexism was offputting. I may be too young to have met the kind of people that they represent.
Moving away from calamities and tragedies, another major genre in the realm of thermonuclear war movies are the war films - productions where the focus is on the decision by leaders and generals to push the button, and then on the officers and enlisted men who carry out their orders to drop the bomb. Hollywood of course has a natural tendency to sycophantically focus on establishment leaders and adopt their point of view, so most of these films are worthless exercises in fellating the Pentagon and the establishment (Hollywood has always had a hard on for the military). The biggest exception is of course Doctor Strangelove (1964), which I won't address directly, but there are two other movies in the same theme that I watched or tried to watch.
Fail Safe (1964)
Kubrick filed a plagiarism lawsuit against Fail Safe, thereby keeping it out of theatres until his own Dr. Strangelove was released. There are superficial similarities between the two movies, and a boatload of parallels that Kubrick probably saw as red flags, but they could not be more different in tone or outlook. Dr Strangelove takes the insanity of cold war brinksmanship and mutually assured destruction, and turns it into black comedy. It calls the establishment on the sociopathy of its view of the bomb and the cold war, and takes the piss out of said views. Fail Safe accepts the establishment view, accepts the insanity as sane, lives inside that world, and then makes us watch the nightmare consequences play out in a tense drama.
The movie is an extremely faithful adaptation of the novel "Fail Safe" by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. America's early warning system throws an alert over an unidentified blip, as it does a few times every month. Before the alert is resolved as a false alarm, an electronic malfunction causes one bomber group to get the go ahead to attack. The film alternates between one of the bomber crews, a roomful of generals and policy makers in the Pentagon, a roomful of communications techs and officers at SAC headquarters, and a tiny room deep under the White House where the President and his Russian translator try to persuade the Soviet premier that it's all a big mistake, please don't launch all your bombs at us.
Fail Safe has one more setting than Dr Strangelove, and features two scenes shot on location that break out of the confines of pentagon bunkers, military bases, and bomber cockpits (unlike Doctor Strangelove), but oddly it feels *more* confined and claustrophobic than Dr Strangelove. At times you get the feeling that the production wanted to be a filmed play rather than a Hollywood production (much later the novel was in fact adapted into a play). The tight, confined feeling of the sets and cinematography seems a deliberate choice to make us feel how the cold warriors it depicts are all blinkered and trapped inside their tiny mental boxes.
Unlike Strangelove, Fail Safe has no antagonists, no villains or madmen. Its heroes struggle on the one hand against a malfunction in a system so complex that no one realizes it's gone haywire until it's too late, and on the other hand against the mistrust and paranoid suspicion between the USSR and the US that created the situation in the first place. They fail to fix the malfunction. They succeed in overcoming the paranoid suspicion, but at terrible cost.
It's a thoughtful, serious film that sadly asks its thoughtful, serious questions without interrogating the paranoid insanity of the Cold War frame of reference. If only it could have adopted Kubrick's scepticism towards the Establishment wisdom. Nevertheless, it's a neglected classic that was unfairly overshadowed and shoved out of the spotlight by Kubrick's comic take on the same theme.
By Dawn's Early Light (1990)
This made for HBO movie was produced before the fall of the Berlin wall but aired afterward. Dated from even before it aired, it has aged quite poorly, but even as an exercise in alternative history, I found it unwatchable except on fast forward. The plot is simple enough - hardline factions within the USSR steal a nuclear weapon and launch it from the vicinity of a NATO base in Turkey against a Russian city. Its detonation sets off an automated but limited retaliatory strike against the White House, Pentagon, and SAC headquarters. Russia's premier assures the president that a full scale attack will only take place if the US launches an all out attack in response. In the resulting chaos, the President, who is injured when his helicopter crashes, is assumed dead and command devolves onto a minor cabinet official, who proceeds to make very poor choices, egged on by an anti-communist military advisor. Only at the last minute does the President manage to get in touch with the Looking Glass airborne command post (whose commander is James Earl Jones because stunt casting) and call off an all out attack.
So it's basically a basket of plot points recycled from Doctor Strangelove (Russia having an unstoppable, automated response to a single bomb going off) and Fail Safe (the president and the premier trying to find a way to avoid escalation after a mistake), tossed in the blender and then half baked into a forgettable thriller. The thing that utterly ruins it are the scenes aboard a B-52 bomber. The bomber does nothing essential to the plot and appears to be there simply because Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe both featured scenes aboard a bomber. The pilot and (female) copilot of the bomber are romantically involved, so every scene featuring them is not only a distraction from the main events, it features badly written 80's style "romantic tension between coworkers" drivel. How this piece of dreck got onto a list of noteworthy nuclear war films is beyond me.
The single biggest genre of nuclear apocalypse movies is of course the post-apocalypse story. Atomic war is just a background plot point to explain why the world has become a lawless wasteland where might makes right and the survivors are in a constant Hobbesean struggle to not become the prey of bullies who have more guns than they do. Hollywood has always loved Westerns and these movies become excuses to produce yet another Western without going to the dried out well of the 1880's yet again. I checked out one and a half examples that made it onto lists of noteworthy nuclear apocalypse movies.
Panic in Year Zero! (1962)
The oldest nuclear war film I've watched, it comes from an era when American fears focused on bombers rather than ICBMs, which means (since bombers can be intercepted and shot down) it was actually possible to legitimately imagine an all out war that only destroys some major cities and some military targets instead of all of them.
The film is based (without acknowledgement) on the novella "Lot" by Ward Moore. While I haven't read it, there are reviews of it on the web (above and here). In brief, a suburban white American family flees LA when war begins, but the father, Mr. Jimmon, is a middle aged white middle class man who runs on resentments, hating his job, his wife, his children, and looking down upon them all as whiny, soft, irrational people who lack his survival instincts and his laser focus on being psychologically and materially prepared to survive the post war world. Only his daughter, who takes after him (whereas his sons are like their mother), meets with his approval. After many pages in which the characters are trapped in a traffic jam of cars fleeing LA, with the father seething in the driver's seat, they finally reach a gas station, where the father abandons his "parasitic" family and heads off into the wilderness with his like-minded daughter. Jimmon is, crucially, depicted as a sociopath rather than some kind of Randian-inspired prepper role model.
So, naturally, the film makers turned the story into a movie by keeping the father's outlook on life but making him into the hero. Harry and Ann Baldwin with their teenage children Rick and Karen set out on a fishing trip. Los Angeles is destroyed shortly after they leave it - they see flashes of light coming from behind them, and then spot the mushroom cloud. Another sign of how early this movie is - it assumes that major civilian targets would be hit with multiple bombs, as would be the case in the atomic era, instead of just a single megaton-class warhead, as in the thermonuclear era.
Like the source material, the first half of the film is obsessed with traffic, interspersing scenes that advance the plot with endless shots of cars travelling very fast on narrow two lane highways. The Baldwins turn around to head back to LA (Ann is particularly worried about her mother) but Harry thinks better of it when a survivor in his dressing gown at a gas station tells them how thoroughly the city has been destroyed. The survivor then slugs the station attendant and drives off without paying for his gas. Harry makes no effort to intervene, explaining to the attendant that his mother didn't raise him to be a hero.
The post-apocalyptic Hobbesian war of all against all is on, and Harry knows exactly what to do - he drives to a back road town that hasn't yet heard of the bombings, and buys a ton of groceries from the grocery store, then a ton of supplies from the hardware store. But he doesn't have enough cash to pay for a bunch of rifles and handguns, so he steals them from the store owner at gunpoint.
Ann lacks Harry's outlook on survival, and is deeply shocked by his sudden criminal behaviour. Instead of abandoning her as in the novella, Harry merely mansplains to her over several conversations that for the next several weeks, they need to focus on survival until civilization "gets civilized again" and the rule of law returns. Survivors from the bombed cities are spreading out across the countryside. "Every footpath will be crawling with men saying 'no matter what I am going to live.' That's what I'm saying too. My family must survive."
To her protest that "intelligent people don't just turn their backs on the rest of the world," he mansplains that that is exactly what smart people will be doing under the current circumstances. When she prevents Rick from killing a juvenile delinquent who is holding a gun on Harry, Harry berates her. Rick is thrilled by the experience of shooting at the mugger, but Harry berates him too - Rick must hate being forced to use the gun, for "a big piece of civilization is gone and your mother wants to save what's left -- and so do I."
Harry's actions continue to belie his words, however. He punches out a gas station attendant rather than pay inflated prices for gas. Coming upon a roadblock where a small town has cordoned off the road, Harry approaches with his handgun drawn and pointed at a spokesperson who approaches him unarmed. Instead of asking the townspeople if there's some way they can escort him past their town, he runs through their roadblock at high speed while his son fires a warning shot at them. They fire back - only protagonist plot protection keeps Harry's family uninjured. And near the end of their journey, Harry sets fire to a puddle of gasoline in the middle of the jam packed freeway to create a break in the traffic for him to cross, setting several people's vehicles on fire.
For all of Harry's pontificating about the destruction of civilization, the movie fails to depict a degree of chaos that justifies his behaviour. The power grid does not fail, the telephone system still works, fallout is mentioned a few times but it doesn't seem to claim any victims and nobody bothers staying under cover out of fear of it. We see no injured survivors, no signs of destruction or devastation, and people continue to treat paper dollars as having value. Washington DC escapes being bombed so the federal government continues to exist.
The movie makers want us to side with Harry, but they really fail to make their point. Aside from a single gang of three hoodlums that the Baldwins encounter on the road and again in the fishing area where Harry plans to hide out (the world of this movie is very small, probably due to a miniscule budget), the only actual signs of order breaking down are in the pathological fears Harry harbours that cause him to go around pointing his gun at every stranger he meets, friendly or unfriendly, and cause him to act like a total dick towards Marilyn, a young woman the gang is treating as a sex slave ("get dressed and get out", he barks at her once they free her from the gang - when Rick shows compassion and invites her to stay with them, it is the only time in the film that Harry's authority is questioned in any way).
Panic in Year Zero only makes sense if you accept the premise of the filmmakers that the potential for disorder, chaos, rape and murder are always there just under the surface, and that the slightest disruption to daily life will cause most people to suddenly for no reason start acting like violent sociopaths.
Despite all the evidence that in real life disasters people act rather better towards each other than they do in ordinary times, and that the natural tendency of people and communities experiencing calamity is to come together and help one other, the meme that disaster causes people to start acting like sociopaths is one that will not die in Hollywood. Hollywood is nothing if not a tool of the establishment, and thus it projects the fears and paranoia of the wealthy (who spend a lot of time worrying that one day the poor will treat them as they have been treating the poor) upon the world.
Miracle Mile (1988)
Imagine that the script for a romantic comedy about an awkward nerdy boy who meets and falls in love with a nerdy girl had a collision on the subway with a script about a boy learning, accidentally, that an all out nuclear attack will be be launched against Russia, with the inevitable consequence of a counter attack, and the world as he knows it will therefore end in 90 minutes. As word of the impending attack spreads from one person to a half dozen to the entire city, chaos, panic, and disorder break out, hugely complicating the boy's attempts to reunite with his girl and wrangle transportation for them both out of town before the bombs drop. In the end, the young couple die within yards of the place they first met the day before when the bomb blast crashes their helicopter.
Yep, this is another "disaster strips away the thin veneer of civilization" movie, with the decent into chaos happening this time before the bombs drop instead or after. I watched the first twenty minutes and the last ten and did not feel I missed anything of real interest in doing so.
And finally, we have another really crappy movie that somehow got onto lists of important nuclear holocaust movies for God knows what reason:
Special Bulletin (1983)
A group of terrorists seize a boat in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. They have a nuclear bomb, which they threaten to detonate if their demands are not met. In the end, they are captured or killed, but the specialists brought in to disarm the bomb fail and it detonates, destroying the city. That simple synopsis leaves out two of the things that made the film aggressively unwatchable for me.
First, the pretence that the entire made for TV movie is found footage captured from the broadcasts of one of the TV networks as it airs special news updates about the crisis. Since the narrative would have been woefully incomplete without showing the story of the terrorists, the network strings a cable into the boat and there is the pretence that the terrorists allowed TV journalists to join them on the boat to interview them and be a fly on the wall while they made their demands. Which is utterly ludicrous on its face - all activists everywhere know that you don't allow the press unrestricted access to your if you want to control your narrative and get your message out the the world undistorted.
The second thing that makes this film not just a crappy forgettable made for TV movie but a feculent and disgusting piece of right wing propaganda is the identity of the terrorists -- they are nuclear disarmament activists who are demanding that the US government give them the arming triggers to the entire US nuclear arsenal stored at the naval base in Charleston. So in the bullshit world depicted in this film, the terrorists, who at the start of the movie are battling local law enforcement with automatic weapons, are pacifists and peaceniks. Which I guess is part and parcel of TV's long history (as the tool and lapdog of the centre-right establishment) of demonizing left wing activists. But still, the ludicrous nature of this particular slander is just too ridiculous for words and make the movie too fucking stupid to watch.