And then there’s Paul Frees’s voiceover epilogue to Beneath The Planet of The Apes:
”In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead"
I found Lord of the Flies (1963 version) extremely depressing when I first saw it. I was 14 at the time, so susceptible to such a movie, and I thought it was all about the brutality that children and adolescents could fall into. Then I realized that what was happening on the island was a microcosm of what had happened in the world, and while the boys might get rescued, there was no rescue for the world.
This fits into this genre, perhaps, and for those who aren’t familiar with the film, because the events are part of the aftermath of a nuclear war. The boys were on a plane evacuating them from Britain when the plane went down and the survivors ended up on the island.
I acknowledge that T3 is one of the low points in the franchise, but it does get some stuff very right. Particularly on a second viewing, watching the action unfold when you already know they won’t beat Skynet, there’s an oppressive and really effective sense of doom that permeates the film. Mostow eschewing score music for much of the second half also helps, you don’t have that as a crutch to give you false hope.
I haven’t read When the Wind Blows for probably thirty years (don’t think I’ve seen the film). The most moving aspect I thought was the old couples’ naive sense that this was another WWII-style ‘blitz’ they were living through, and that they would ‘tough it out’ like the last one.
If we’re doing literature, I must say I was very grateful that the ending of the short story “Fermi and Frost” was multiple choice.
The moment when the old man tosses his dinner dishes into the trash, because the radiation has affected his brain. You know it’s downhill from there. Good times.
When they get the pilot’s wife on the radio frantically begging him to stop the attack…
“You’re asking me to do what I’ve been specifically been trained not to do!” (paraphrased)
… I’ve always thought that he knew he had to abort, he knew it was a mistake, but had to follow his training. A scary thought. Lots of implications.
Dated but scary as hell.
You’re conflating a little dialogue, but yes…gawwd that scene kills me.
Agreed, I was going to post Testament as the most haunting post nuclear war movie ever, even though it doesn’t even show any nuclear bombs going off.
The part when she then wraps her son in a towel and hes bled through it was hard.
Not a movie movie (a made-for-TV movie) and not exactly about nuclear war, but still pretty harrowing: “Special Bulletin” in 1983 was shot from the point of view of a news report about a group of nuclear scientists turned terrorists docked in a boat off Charleston, SC, who had a nuclear device. They were demanding that all the nuclear weapons in the area (apparently an important staging ground for nuclear subs was nearby) be disabled or they would set off the nuke.
A reporter and cameraman were taken hostage, so the scene alternated from the news anchors to the increasingly desperate scene on the boat with the nuclear scientists (one of whom seemed to be dying from radiation poisoning). Then suddenly a Delta Force team was seen by another news camera outside the boat converging on it. They wiped out the terrorist scientists and a nuke defusing team went on board, but as they were frantically trying to defuse it…static.
The shaken anchor team cut to a reporter on a Navy ship a couple miles offshore, which confirmed…Charleston went boom.
I remember the show being pretty controversial at the time, NBC being accused of potentially creating another “War of the Worlds” style panic, although they ran a lot of disclaimers throughout that the show was fiction. It was very realistic and well done, and kept you on the edge of your seat the entire time.
It reminded me of that t shirt that says, on the back, “I am a bomb disposal tech. If you see me running, try to keep up.” No one can run that fast.
Though he was clinically nuts, it bothered me that he made the bomb improperly, for his stated goals. You don’t make so tamper-resistant that one false move makes it easy to trigger, if you don’t actually intend for it to go off. Because the movie is what you get in that case. Just use a dead-man switch.
Just an observation. But isn’t it odd that all of the examples are from films about fictional nuclear war? I have read some, indeed, harrowing eyewitness accounts of the real one in 1945, yet somehow the real thing is less cinematically compelling than those created from whole cloth.
When the wind blows.
Nothing remotely graphic, but still gives me chills (as a child of the cold war who grew up in the south of England in an area which clearly had a big target marker on in it in a map somewhere in the soviet union, and being absolutely terrified of the idea of nuclear war)
Maybe because any filmed, documentary style accounts of the actual bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki done soon after the fact were deliberately done in a non-provocative, ‘just the facts’ style?
As a kid I certainly remember finding those pictures of people-shaped shadows on ruined walls that were all that was left of people who were vaporized to be pretty harrowing to contemplate.
I saw Special Bulletin when it aired in 1983, and it was chilling.
I see I’m not the first poster to mention this. Still totally the most harrowing nuclear war movie even if its not remotely graphic.
Seeing the footage from test shots like Ivy Mike or Castle Bravo send shivers up my spine, 'cause that footage is real–no special effects or anything. Want a good collection of them? Try Trinity and Beyond, narrated by Shatner.
Tripler
Real-life is scarier than fiction.
To me (again as a kid growing up in the cold war, utterly terrified of nuclear war) this is because it wasn’t the actual nuclear explosion that was harrowing. It was the finality of it, its not some disaster where if you survive it you can expect help to come and to escape to somewhere unaffected (as happened to survivors of Horoshima for all the horrors of that), it was the fact the survivors then have to face something as awful as the explosion itself in the post-nuclear-war world.
It’s storytelling. One death is a tragedy, a hundred thousand is a statistic. A shadow of a kid playing that is burned into a wall is just an artifact. The Martian Chronicles took the same image and made it a compelling tragic narrative.
The holocaust is the same way. Countless millions dead in piles being bulldozed into a ditch doesn’t impact people as much as an anonymous girl in a red coat glimpsed by the movie protagonist does. It should, but it doesn’t.
Also, the world’s first nuclear war wasn’t filmed in close up in technicolor and Dolby. We don’t get to see the impact, just the aftermath. And they were “the enemy”. The films listed are about “us”.