I don’t know why this bothers me so much, maybe someone can explain. I was just going thorugh the TV channels to see what’s on and the Sci-fi Channel had “The Day After” It came out in late 1983 or early 1984, because I watched it with a buch of people while in Chicago at school. I KNOW it’s just a story, but I couldn’t stop to watch because it felt so sad and disturbing. I saw it one other time, about five years ago, and I remember wishing that they could JUST GET PAST the points where the missiles launch, and have everything be alright. Stupid of me, is it not? Maybe the fact that much of the plot was set in Lawrence, Kansas, about twenty five miles from where I have lived all my life, has something to do with how creeped out I was.
Well, for some comic relief on this subject I could mention Wargames with Matthew Broderick.
My recollection of The Day After is that it wasn’t a very good (TV) movie. It got so much press that George Schultz, then the Secretary of State, came on live after the broadcast to discuss the possibility of nuclear war. Did you see the movie that just came out, Thirteen Days? If you are interested in this topic, check it out. Even though the events portrayed actually happened (Cuban Missle Crisis) I did not feel creeped out. Have you seen the movie (or recent TV remake of) Fail Safe? It tries to realisticaly depict the sequence of events that might happen if an order to deliver nuclear weapons was given in error, through electronic malfunction. Dr. Strangelove is also a classic.
Without getting into a GD, I’d just say relax. The world is most likely going to be around long after you and I are gone.
I loved The Day After. It’s another example of why I think Nicholas Meyer is the unsung king of TV-movies. (He also made “Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders”, “The Night that Panicked America”, and co-produced “The Odyssey”. This is in addition to his Sherlock Holmes novels, his writing and directing “Time After Time”, and being involved in the best of the Star trek movies – #2, #4, and #6. But I digress.)
Even so, “The Day After” bothers me as being too “clean”. If you want to see an after-the-bomb movie that will REALLY blow your socks away and depress you, get “The War Game” by Peter watkins (not to be confused with “Wargames”, the Matthe Broderick film noted above). It was commisioned by the BBC in the 1960s, but was so scary (or, more likely, its editorial and philosophical slant so “wrong”) that they have never shown it on the BBC. This movie looks like actual footage from a nuclear war. Scary as hell.
Another good film is “Threads”, which looks like an updated “War Game”. I know this one was available in some video stores ten years back.
UK dopers might know how you felt if they had seen Threads the series dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
Chilling stuff.
I saw Threads when it premiered on Australian TV during the early 1980’s. The Day After had been seen on Australian screens in the previous year, so it was relatively easy to compare the emotional impact of the two.
Threads was screened on commercial channel, following some cross promotion from another show on the same network. There was only one commercial break inserted during the entire movie - and that was in the first 15 minutes.
I found the movie to be utterly compelling, realistic and chilling in the extreme. It should be compulsory viewing for anyone with any involvement with nuclear weapons. It made The Day After look optomistic in comparison.
As a result of seeing Threads, I have decided that if the unthinkable was to happen, I hope I get vaporised in the first exchange, because the alternative is far, far worse…
The most heart wrenching post nuclear war movie was “Testament.” It was miserable–especially the point when the mother is sewing her dead daughter in a bed sheet as a burial shroud.
From my recollection everyone I knew growing up in Canada was also freaked out by this movie.
“The Day After” came out at the perfect time for me. I was around 11 years old and just beginning to understand how dangerous the world could be. That this could happen was quite horrifying. (To think there are people in the world right now experiencing even worse than this!)
I’ve seen a British animated movie lately “When the Wind Blows”, I think. About an elederly couple after a nuclear strike. Sad stuff.
I was just a kid when The Day After was on the first time, and I remember it being really hyped, and being afraid to watch it. I don’t think my parents kept me from it, but then again, it probably ran past my bedtime.
I didn’t see it in its entirety until just this past year. And I totally identify with Baker’s OP. With commercial breaks on the Sci-Fi network, it was three hours long. I wanted to turn it off, and I couldn’t make myself do it, but it just depressed the hell out of me. I’m really intrigued by the mentions of Threads and Testament (they’ve come up in other threads, too).
The Day After scared me, not depressed me.
I was 14 when it was on TV, but I didn’t watch. I wasn’t scared by the idea, but my parents didn’t watch, on the grounds that they’d lived through the Cuban Missle Crisis, and that was enough for them, thank you. I wasn’t in the habit of watching TV at the time, so I skipped it too. When I was 16, our history teacher showed it to us, and I was petrified. Our first day of viewing it ended after the initial blast. When the missles were going up, I was pale and shaking; my so-called boyfriend leaned over to me. I thought he was going to reassure me. Instead, he asked me what time it was..
I saw it again when I was 20. My dad had rented a copy for some reason, and wanted me to watch it with him (first viewing for him). My mom left the house. During the detonation, I paused it and jabbered to my dad my theory that “the Russians will never do this to us. Not knowing that we’ll do it right back to them. They have their music Shostakovich and their poetry Yevtushenko and their art I don’t know and their history and Lenin in his tomb. They have as much to lose as we do. It’s ****ers like Hussein and Khadafi that we have to worry about.” He said “You’re right,” and I restarted the movie.
Two scenes I remember clearly: When the missles are going up from Kansas, the picture gets wavery, supposedly from the rocket exhaust. The missle silos are in a field that backs up to a horse paddock, and almost in slow motion, a beautiful white palomino gallops up to the fence and whinnies full force. Trite juxtaposition, I know, it makes the shot a fraction less terrifying.
In the aftermath, people are starting to group up. Some guy, under what authority I don’t know, has gathered the local farmers to discuss the crucial next planting and harvest. He starts by telling them to remove the top layer of earth, the part that’s contaminated, and can get no further, because their questions don’t have answers. “How deep did the radiation get? Topsoil only goes down so far. Who’s going to test the level of radiation? What about the radiation that’s still in the air? Are we suppposed to dig with contaminated tools? And where do we put the dirt we skim? Our seeds are contaminated, too, you know.” If people in the fifties who were selling or building bomb shelters had heard this, they would have seen themselves for the fools they were.
And speaking of that, after the movie, and after my dad had had a beer, which he never does, he dug out some pamphlets from the early sixties that instructed what to do in the event of nuclear attack. One that particularly cracked me up suggested using one’s garage as a shelter (to be fair, from radiation, not the blast) and packing furniture and boxes really tight against the outside walls, so radiation couldn’t seep in.
The Day After was a fantastic movie in that it grabbed you by the short hairs and held you. There was another, set as a live newscast in Charleston, SC, and they played it like a real newscast, pausing for actual commercials. Semi War-of-the-Worlds-like. I was living an hour south of Chasn. Forget the title. A little help?
That TV movie was called Special Bulletin, and it starred Ed Flanders of TV’s St. Elsewhere as one of the newsanchors. Truly one of the scariest and most devastating films I’ve ever seen. When the movie was broadcast, the network ran a crawler at the bottom of the screen explaining that this was a movie, not an actual newscast. Good thing, too, because the realism was unparalleled. Without that crawler, we might very well have had a War of the Worlds situation on our hands. I get chills just thinking about it now!
Where I live they didn’t have a crawler saying it was “just a movie”. One of my friends had another acquaintance that called her up sobbing because this other person had an aunt in Charleston and thought the show was real. I would have thought that is you just changed the channels you would have got a clue, but the show was very realistic. Maybe the poor girl was just so riveted to the broadcast it didn’t occur to her.
My memory could be faulty, too. It’s possible that when the movie was first broadcast in 1983 the crawler was not used; perhaps I am thinking of a subsequent airing. It’s possible someone or a group of someones was distressed enough about the original airing seeming so realistic that when the movie was re-broadcast the crawler was added…