I watched "The Day After" yesterday

for the first time in awhile and I'll tell you, even though that movie has some bad 80's TV movie acting and some even worse special effects and it takes place during the cold war....

this current flare up is eerily reminsicient of the slow escalation you hear on the radios and TVs in the background up until the nukes hit.

I am not saying I am afraid of the nukes reigning down anytime soon, but having just watched that movie yesterday, its got me thinking about what is going on now and how easily it could escalate out of control.

I have to admit, I am nervous.

I remember watching it with friends when it first ran. The ads all suggested watching with friends and not letting young children watch.

Afterward (to reassure and calm everyone) there was a very serious panel discussion with all sorts of 'experts,' including Kissinger. They basically said (as I recall) that this really couldn't/wouldn't ever happen here.

and good ol' Steve Guttenberg, lol.

Like I said, cheeseball movie, but the premise and the way they portray the events unfolding in the background is well done.

Robards

another interesting movie from the 80's. I sort of feel like if we made it through the cold war without killing the world, then what could possibly go wrong now?

It was really scary.

Israel is about to start World War Three in order to rescue two of their soldiers; what could go wrong?

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

what go wrong?

I'm just sayin that I have been nervous before about other events that people have gotten riled up about (us attacking Iran in June etc, etc) but this one feels different...maybe becuase Israel is invloved and they are such a controversial pawn to begin with.

Some of those cheesy special effects were stock footage from test blasts done before the test ban treaties were signed. You can see the same clips in Atomic Cafe. They didn't have the budget to do the buildings imploding, the trees blown almost to the ground, and then back in the other direction, and, in the shot of the dust storm, you can see a measuring device of some kind in the frame.

The rest was pure soap opera.

I own a copy in my small collection of nuke movies, along with Testament, Atomic Cafe, Dr. Strangelove.

n/t

Jane Alexander in a heart wrenching performance.

This movie came out around the same time as "Day After" but is much, much, better.
A reviewer at Amazon said "That these films all came out at the same time, must have had something to do with Reagan being in the White House with his hand on the button"

Look at who we have now.

No cheesy special effects and no "B" movie acting...the film focuses on what happens to a suburban mother and her family after San Francisco is destroyed by a nuclear device.

William Devane is Alexander's husband, away on business when the big one hits.

Watching how she deals with her four children as they progress through various stages of radiation sickness is difficult to sit through.

I think this is one of the more powerful films I have ever seen about what it would be like if a strike of this magnitude ever hit a major America city.

See it.

"Testament" is the far more effective film. The sense of loss, and isolation, is overwhelming, and the point -- that there is no point, and in the end, it won't matter who attacked whom, or why (and, perhaps most importantly, that our interpersonal/political differences will cease to exist when we're all facing the end, together) -- could never be made any more perfectly.

A bloody brilliant work that very few people have seen. Should be required viewing for everyone on the planet.

I still can't watch it without sobbing.

winter. That filmed scared the bejesus out of me.

Here's the imdb link.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086429/

...was when all the missiles starting launching up out of the ground, and people were looking out and seeing them rise into the sky...knowing, of course, what was to come afterwards.

The government class I taught was riveted by it and we spent over a week discussing it.

That was the most chilling scene for me as well.

I'd say Road Warrior was the most accurate.

I was thinking about that movie today.

While watching events unfold on CNN, I was taken by how many parts of the world are pretty much f'd up right now. The headlines are horrible... Iran shrugs off the UN, North Korea storms out of talks, more horrific Iraq War violence, Israel and Lebanon lobbing missiles, Oil reaches record high, Tensions escalate in Dafur.

I thought back to "The Day After" and those eerie television and radio reports that were always on in the background, while the characters went about planning weddings, attending college... I was so young when that film came out and it always terrified me.

And it seems like... well, it seems just there are too many things going wrong at one time... I'm incredibly worried.

The way the war started in the film was very well done.

One side uses a "battlefield nuke". The other side counters and the nukes keep getting bigger until...

I always thought that was the most likely scenario for how a nuclear war would start.

There's an intersting bit at NPR about the effect the filming had on Lawrence KS.

There's also this link

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/D/htmlD/dayafterth/dayafter.htm

The Day After, a dramatization of the effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States was one of the biggest media events of the 1980s. Programmed by ABC on Sunday, 20 November 1983, The Day After was watched by an estimated half the adult population, the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie to that time. The movie was broadcast after weeks of advance publicity, fueled by White House nervousness about its anti-nuclear "bias". ABC had distributed a half-million "viewer's guides" and discussion groups were organized around the country. A studio discussion, in which Secretary of State took part, was conducted following the program. The advance publicity was unprecedented in scale. It centered on the slogan "THE DAY AFTER--Beyond Imagining. The starkly realistic drama of nuclear confrontation and its devastating effect on a group of average American citizens..."

....



ABC defined the production both in terms of realism--for example, the special effects to do with the missiles and blast were backed up with rosters of scientific advisors--and of art, as a surrealist vision of the destruction of western civilization--as miniaturized in a mid-West town and a nuclear family (graphically represented in the movie poster). Network executives were particularly sensitive to the issue of taste and the impact of horror on sensitive viewers (they knew that Watkins' film had been deemed "too horrifying for the medium of television"), although, contradictorily, the majority of the audience was supposed to be already inured to the depiction of suffering. The delicate issue of identification with victims and survivors was handled by setting the catastrophe in a real town with ICBM silos and by using a large cast of relatively unknown actors (though John Lithgow, playing a scientist, would become more famous) and a horde of extras, constellated around the venerable Jason Robards as a doctor. Time magazine opined that "much of the power came from the quasi-documentary idea that nuclear destruction had been visited upon the real town of Lawrence, Kansas, rather than upon some back lot of Warner Brothers." Scriptwriter Edward Hume decided to fudge the World War III scenario: "It's not about politics or politicians or military decision-makers. It is simply about you and me--doctors, farmers, teachers, students, brothers and kid sisters engaged in the usual love and labor of life in the month of September." (This populist dimension was reinforced when the mayor of Lawrence, Kansas sent a telegram to Soviet leader Andropov.)

There is an American pastoralism at work in the depiction of prairie life. The director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II) was aware of the danger of lapsing into formulae, and wrote in a "production diary" for TV Guide: "The more The Day After resembles a film, the less effective it is likely to be. No TV stars. What we don't want is another Hollywood disaster movie with viewers waiting to see Shelley Winters succumb to radiation poisoning. To my surprise, ABC agrees. Their sole proviso: one star to help sell the film as a feature oversees. Fair enough." Production proceeded without the cooperation of the Defense Department, which had wanted the script to make it clear the Soviets started the war. Despite sequences of verite and occasional trappings of actuality, the plot develops in soap opera fashion, with two families about to be united by marriage. But it evolves to an image of a community that survives the nuclear family, centered on what is left of the local university and based on the model of a medieval monastery. Although November was sweeps month, there were to be no commercial breaks after the bomb fell. Even so, its critics assimilated the film to the category of made-for-TV treatment of sensational themes. Complained a New York Times editorial: "A hundred million Americans were summoned to be empathetically incinerated, and left on the true day after without a single idea to chew upon." Other critics found it too tame in its depiction of the effects of nuclear attack (abroad, this was sometimes attributed to American naivete about war)--a reproach anticipated in the final caption "The catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States". ...

more....

-Susan Emmanuel