When it aired, I had a teacher who wanted us to watch it in class so she sent permission slips home to get permission from parents to show it and we watched it over the next couple of days. In chunks and in a classroom I didn’t really get the full effect, plus talking about each section probably dulled any impact it had but a few years later I rented it from a video store and felt it was well done for what it was trying to do.
Do you mean because it looks fake? Like the set is going to be cleaned up after the director yells “cut!”
Or that things are going to get better in the world of the movie… because as outlined by other posters… Yeah… if not all of the cast is dead or dying by the end.
Also.. it’s Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo who comforts Jason Robards at the end.
No, I was too scared - I was 9-10, and utterly terrified of nuclear war.
Joe
I was in elementary school at the time when I saw it at home. I really didn’t remember most of it at the time except for the nuclear attack and a part of the ending. There was some talk the next day at school, but given the subject and how many parents didn’t allow their kids to see it, there wasn’t much. I didn’t see the movie again until I was in college on cable. Most of my fellow students remember the title and what it was about, but not much else.
I was about 11 at the time, living in Oxfordshire. Threads was on first, then I think we saw The Day After a few weeks later. Threads scared the living shit out of me and I couldn’t sleep well for about a week. The Day After? Not so much. I guess to me, America was so freakin’ huge, that they could suffer a couple of nukes, and if you were lucky enough not to be at ground zero, maybe not suffer much at all.
With Threads - was the bomb dropped on Leicester? I think it was… well, that was too bloody close to home. In addition, we lived a few miles from RAF Upper Heyford and just down the road from Greenham Common and Fairford, which no doubt were on the Soviet’s hit list. So the danger was all too close. And I think the Soviets could hit Britain in about five minutes.
Watched it, liked it. It’s by Nicholas Meyer, the unsung King of TV Movies* (besides being the author of [i[The Seven Per Cent Solution* and two other Sherlock Holmes novels, directing and writing Time After Time, and being associated as writer and/or director with three of the best Star Trek movies). It made a big imnpact, was on the cover of Newsweek, and had people talking.
But it all seemed too clean. Despite the awfulness, people seemed too healthy in the aftermath. Shortly before I saw it, I finally got a chance to see The War Game, which I still think is the best of these types of films. In that low-budget but highly effective film (made for the BBC, but not broadcast by themm until dacdes after it was made) you see people covered with dirt or blood or something (it’s black and white, so you can’t really tell), with blank looks on their faces, shaking back and forth. They have the newsreel look of people who have been shattered and devastated by their experience, unlike the plastic-perfect people in The Day After. The War Game also showed police and firemen trying to contain the damage, with the notice that some people had to be shot to keep order and prevent looting. Day After didn’t have anything about that.
I saw Threads sometime later, and it felt like the legitimate successor to The War Game – it showed a grittier and more believable post-nuclear-war landscape, with the awful effects feeling scatily real. And messy.
*he’s responsible for The Night that Panicked America, about the 1938 “War of the World” Broadcast, The Hallmark Odyssey, and Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders
I was 11, and had pretty much the same reaction.
I agree that The War Game did the best job of any fictional treatment I’ve seen. However, The Day After has various scenes at the hospital in particular where dirty, bedraggled people are depicted showing signs of PTSD and radiation poisoning. I don’t know really how they could have shown them less plastic perfect. Here’s a short scene that shows some of what I’m talking about.
*
The War Game* works so effectively partly because of the conceit that it’s a documentary. A survivor explains directly how he feels in a way none of the characters in TDA or Threads can. One particularly horrifying part of The War Game is when the narrator explains that at a certain point the effects of radiation poisoning and of shock would be indistinguishable.
I don’t think there are any police depicted in TDA at all. There are however military personnel. At one point in the film a hospital orderly tells a doctor that he’s heard they’re shooting looters. The doctor is angry and incredulous at the suggestion. Towards the end of the film when the elderly doctor decides to go home, the truck he’s travelling in passes an ad hoc execution of what’s presumably looters. Later again he stumbles across a man in a gas mask trying to take a watch off a corpse.
That scene really stuck with me as well, much more so then the rest of the movie. The characters are all going about their normal lives and then stop when they see the missiles going up, knowing that it means within fifteen minutes or so the Russian strike and their lives will be over, at least figuratively and probably literally as well.
I think they did have a scene where the military, or what was left of it, was holding summary executions to keep order. (on checking wikipedia, it sounds like a lot of the more violent footage was cut from the original run. I saw it in the late 80’s, so it may be that scene was cut in the original airing).
Anyhoo, I didn’t see it during the original airing, but I thought it was pretty good. I saw a review somewhere that said the movie “wasn’t very subtle, but then neither is its subject matter” which sounds about right.
Don’t recall that scene, but most of the clip you link to shows people who don’t seem all that broken up about what’s just happened. The fact that the scenes from The War Game are still burned into my mind, all these years later, tells me that it was more pronounced and effective there. And, IIRC, there were quite a few of them. One scene showed a boy blinded by the flash of the bomb going off.
My full memory dump of the show:
[ul]
[li]"<gasp!> Those are Minutemen!"[/li][li]Nine seconds of SFX where people turn into x-ray images before being evaporated.[/li][/ul]
Yeah, that’s about it.
Edit: Wow, that was show in '83? Huh…my pop-culture retention of that time is generally pretty strong, so I’m surprised I don’t remember more about the show. Hell, I can still tell you most of the lineup of the US Festival.
I saw it in school years after it first aired.
I came away with two thoughts: 1) If nuclear war happens, you’re better off dead. 2) It’s utter folly to believe that scientists or government officials can formulate means of enduring the devastation wrought by a nuclear war without society collapsing (in particular, the scene where the farmers are told that they merely have to scrape off the top inch of contaminated soil from their acres of land in order to start growing crops again; they don’t take that directive too kindly).
Yep - I remember the panel, but had to go Wikipedia for the details:
I remember seeing it when I was 9, and I cried, but it also scared the heck out of me.
Years later, as a High school junior, I had to take a summer school class. Some idiot jock (who slept through most of the class) asked the teacher shortly after the attack sequence if this was based off a true story.
With a withering look he replied “Yes, Kansas City was destroyed in 1983 via nuclear Holocaust. You may have slept through it.”
Sadly, that was the only good thing he did. This same teacher paused the movie to point out the “Nuclear Winter” that was already starting… while referencing the fall out ash that was drifting down. Yeesh.
Saw it when it first aired, it terrified the stuffing out of me. I was a teenager.
I was in high school or junior high – I don’t recall exactly, as it was many moons ago and besides the wench is dead. We had to watch it for class. I remember being freaking terrified.
I was in the Navy, training to operate Submarine Nuclear reactors. A good portion of our training was in “Radcon” dealing with radiation and contamination. I remember screaming at the TV when the people were running around in the ash/fallout. “Get inside you jerks! Fallout is an Alpha emitter!” (A type of particle radiation that causes SEVERE cell damage but is short ranged and semi short lived) Kinda like you scream at the screen during a horror movie “Don’t go outside you jerk! The ax murderer is out there!”
What a nerd I was! :smack:
Saw it in the student center at UGA as a college freshman or sophomore, with about a hundred other students. It was a big, MUST SEE TV event, the likes of which we really don’t really appreciate these days because you can pretty much see anything you want anytime you want.
It was very serious because the Cold War was, and we had all grown up with the idea that nuclear was a real possibility. The movie itself was little cheesy and hokey, but the image of the Minuteman missiles flying over the countryside stays with me.
After the movie ended, a couple of hippie commie girls stood up and started addressing the crowd through their tears, sobbing that if we could all just be pen pals with some Russians we could prevent this terrible tragedy. They were shouted down pretty quickly because people wanted to see the Ted Koppel thing after the movie.
Yes, because that’s the way the end of the world would start in real life: no trumpets, no Rapture, just white contrails suddenly reaching up from the ground.
I always joked that The Day After warned us that global thermonuclear exchange was going to turn everything into piles of two-by-fours. As long as we keep some carpenters safely underground, we’ll be okay. Seriously, it seemed to way underemphasize the probable effects – Hiroshima looked worse.
I saw it when it first aired (trivia: it was November 20, 1983 - and I can tell you where I was exactly one year earlier; in the crowd at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley watching a bunch of Cal football players run through the Stanford band).
If you saw it when it first aired, did you think the President sounded too much like Reagan? (They never show him - just have his voice on a radio broadcast, I think.) If so, you were not alone; subsequent airings changed the voice to sound different.
And although they say they went to great lengths not to give any “clues” as to who launched first, there was one; just before the major attack, somebody yells out, “They’ve gone tactical!” - i.e. somebody launched smaller “tactical” nuclear missiles aimed at troops, which, at the time, was something only NATO was considering (in case the Soviet troops got too far west; there wouldn’t be time for the USA to call a draft and train enough troops to counter the attack).