I would vote for LADYBUG, LADYBUG from 1963, an underrated movie about how an alert impacts a rural elementary school. It's the only movie of the era that asks what the psychological impact that civil defense and the nuclear threat have on young people and teachers.
A splendid list, including the honorable mentions.
To add:
-Panic in Year Zero (1961), an early post-nuclear war survivalist tale. Focuses on the weeks after an attack on LA.
-Special Bulletin (1983), an odd, scary faux-documentary, kinda found footage movie about some Americans threatening to set off an atomic bomb in a US city. You might cut it for tv.
-The Sacrifice (1986), a dreamy Tarkovsky parable about a meditative, religious response to impending nuclear war.
-A Boy and His Dog (1975), sleazy, grim post-nuclear tale written by the late great Harlan Ellison.
-Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), a thriller about soldiers seizing a missile silo. Really about Vietnam.
-Pandora (2016), good South Korean story about atomic power disaster. Emphasizes social connections.
-the first two Planet of the Apes movies, especially Beneath.
Also, I know you'd exclude it as tv, but Edge of Darkness (1985) is a weird, powerful story wandering to atomic power.
Threads holds a special place for me. I watched it on my own.
I'm from that region, and the opening scenes made me nostalgic for my own childhood, about a decade after the film. Between that and people talking like what I do probably had a bigger impact on me.
I think part of what I did afterwards was loading up NUKEMAP to establish that if the shit hit the fan that I'd be in the "dies immediately" crowd, not the "survivors".
One of my favourites that’s not on your list is By Dawn’s Early Light, the last WWIII film made before the collapse of the USSR. A bit of soap opera between the two pilots (Powers Boothe and Rebecca de Mornay), but good performances all around (Especially from Darren McGavin, with a typically earnest performance from Martin Landau); a tense, exciting plot; and James Earl Jones executing the finest swan song salute in cinema. Well worth the watch.
My mom worked in the Manhattan project and had a copy of one of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki aftermath reports. I read that in my early teens. I don't know if that was the cause, but I was never interested in the movies attempting to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war.
As an early form of computer nerd, I did like Wargames., which was more of a comment on AI than anything else (that commentary on AI is still the same today).
I worked in the public utility nuclear industry (manufacturing and construction of the nuclear steam supply system) and also in engineering support of nuclear reactor systems for the US Navy at KAPL. I was therefore familiar with that type of nuclear power. When I tried to watch the China Syndrome, I had to turn it off. Hollywood often has difficulty with technical details but this movie must have been one of the more technically inept I've ever tried to watch. I was working at KAPL when the book Red October came out and we were surprised that the details were so technically correct or so precisely extrapolated. The movie was good for that very reason ... one of the few hollywood movies where they got the details mostly right (I think mostly due to T. Clancy's perseverance).
The Peacemaker is a nice fit for the 1990s "who knows what the hell is happening over there" post-Soviet breakup era. Like, remember when smugglers got caught with a couple kilos of HEU in Prague in 1994? It's also a nicely done action flick by Mimi Leder. She does good work.
One could add _The World, The Flesh, and the Devil_ to the honorable mentions list.
It's set in a post-apocalypse New York City, which is oddly intact yet contains only three survivors, two men & one woman. But their story revolves more around race and sex, than it is about the global radiological catastrophic attack prior to the film's start.
the only one that was news to me, but its a biggie is - TESTAMENT - because nuke films are usually a subset of disaster films, wherein the serious message gets lost in the human desire to wallow in others' disasters if onlhy for 90 minutes...
Maybe not essential, but THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN (1979) deserves a mention: a disaffected middle-school chemistry teacher in late 70s Tokyo contrives to build an atomic bomb in his tiny apartment. He succeeds, but then what. There's romance, intrigue, chase scenes, and escalating gags. The look and sound are propulsive and pop, anticipating much 80s stuff on MTV and in French cinema du look. It stands askance in its ultra distanced view of the bomb and its meaning from the other Japanese movies mentioned. It's more than worth a watch, though my impression is it's hard to see. I was lucky to go to a recent screening of an original 35mm print at the Japan Society in New York, where it really popped.
"Testament" in my opinion is too flawed to merit inclusion when it's covering poorly the same ground as "The Day After." The filmmakers on "Testament" genuinely seem to have no idea of the reality of what they're trying to portray: fallout is expressed as one morning a few days after the bombs the plates they take out of closed cabinets have gotten dusty. Or they fret about the possible radioactive contamination of milk in a carton in their fridge that was bought prior to the bombs falling. It might work for someone who doesn't know anything about the topic, but the basic factual errors took me out of it.
I'm also not sure "House of Dynamite" is good enough to stand on its own, but it probably deserves some credit for tackling the topic at a time when it's not much in the public mind.
I mean, the latter could just be the characters vaguely remembering "milk tainted by radiation" and not know how anything works. The dust I couldn't remember being literally fallout, maybe it was symbolic, but I've played a lot of Fallout video games, so wacky radiation doesn't bother me anyway. You're literally the first person I have ever seen to critique that movie.
The children dying slowly and at different times is so horrendous.
Although it's in the allegorical or metaphorical category that you excluded from the list, The Birds captures the feelings of helplessness and dread that the arms race provokes.
I assume you are omitting documentaries. If not, I liked "The Man Who Saved the World," which sheds light on close calls; another good reason to get rid of nuclear weapons. Or odd categories like films or series based on video games, like Fallout, which I just found very entertaining; fun fact: parts of it were filmed in the Namibian Desert, which is a natural-looking hell-scape.
Maybe it's because I was both a Nevil Shutte and Gregory Peck fan, but On the Beach affected me the most, or rather, did the most harm to me personally, mainly due to fanning the unrealistic and implausible doomsday narrative, which also feeds the ongoing primacy bias established by the Americans in the last months of World War II and the opening years of the Cold War.
I think every one of these films, starting with On the Beach, needs to be debunked as thoroughly as possible, some more than others. Most are certainly fear-mongering, but all leave the issue of the efficacy of nuclear weapons unquestioned, elevating them to god-like status, which makes practical solutions that do not rely solely on moral suasion that much harder to argue or implement.
In the early 1950s, the Japanese Teachers Union commissioned two films in the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The 1952 drama film "Children of Hiroshima"
I would vote for LADYBUG, LADYBUG from 1963, an underrated movie about how an alert impacts a rural elementary school. It's the only movie of the era that asks what the psychological impact that civil defense and the nuclear threat have on young people and teachers.
A splendid list, including the honorable mentions.
To add:
-Panic in Year Zero (1961), an early post-nuclear war survivalist tale. Focuses on the weeks after an attack on LA.
-Special Bulletin (1983), an odd, scary faux-documentary, kinda found footage movie about some Americans threatening to set off an atomic bomb in a US city. You might cut it for tv.
-The Sacrifice (1986), a dreamy Tarkovsky parable about a meditative, religious response to impending nuclear war.
-A Boy and His Dog (1975), sleazy, grim post-nuclear tale written by the late great Harlan Ellison.
-Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), a thriller about soldiers seizing a missile silo. Really about Vietnam.
-Pandora (2016), good South Korean story about atomic power disaster. Emphasizes social connections.
-the first two Planet of the Apes movies, especially Beneath.
Also, I know you'd exclude it as tv, but Edge of Darkness (1985) is a weird, powerful story wandering to atomic power.
Threads holds a special place for me. I watched it on my own.
I'm from that region, and the opening scenes made me nostalgic for my own childhood, about a decade after the film. Between that and people talking like what I do probably had a bigger impact on me.
I think part of what I did afterwards was loading up NUKEMAP to establish that if the shit hit the fan that I'd be in the "dies immediately" crowd, not the "survivors".
Agree… threads was dark and unforgettable
Much like Fail Safe, The Bedford Incident captures the tension of living on the nuclear knife edge. It's a good movie, one I recommend.
Yes. Came here to add that one. I consider it part of a Strangelove/Failsafe/Bedford trilogy.
And it’s a naval setting, so it has some different textures from most of the others.
One of my favourites that’s not on your list is By Dawn’s Early Light, the last WWIII film made before the collapse of the USSR. A bit of soap opera between the two pilots (Powers Boothe and Rebecca de Mornay), but good performances all around (Especially from Darren McGavin, with a typically earnest performance from Martin Landau); a tense, exciting plot; and James Earl Jones executing the finest swan song salute in cinema. Well worth the watch.
Fascinating, underrated film.
So agree on this! Loved cast and story. Check out book was based on too, Trinity’s Child.
I think our author reviewed that not long ago!
My mom worked in the Manhattan project and had a copy of one of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki aftermath reports. I read that in my early teens. I don't know if that was the cause, but I was never interested in the movies attempting to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war.
As an early form of computer nerd, I did like Wargames., which was more of a comment on AI than anything else (that commentary on AI is still the same today).
I worked in the public utility nuclear industry (manufacturing and construction of the nuclear steam supply system) and also in engineering support of nuclear reactor systems for the US Navy at KAPL. I was therefore familiar with that type of nuclear power. When I tried to watch the China Syndrome, I had to turn it off. Hollywood often has difficulty with technical details but this movie must have been one of the more technically inept I've ever tried to watch. I was working at KAPL when the book Red October came out and we were surprised that the details were so technically correct or so precisely extrapolated. The movie was good for that very reason ... one of the few hollywood movies where they got the details mostly right (I think mostly due to T. Clancy's perseverance).
The Peacemaker is a nice fit for the 1990s "who knows what the hell is happening over there" post-Soviet breakup era. Like, remember when smugglers got caught with a couple kilos of HEU in Prague in 1994? It's also a nicely done action flick by Mimi Leder. She does good work.
One could add _The World, The Flesh, and the Devil_ to the honorable mentions list.
It's set in a post-apocalypse New York City, which is oddly intact yet contains only three survivors, two men & one woman. But their story revolves more around race and sex, than it is about the global radiological catastrophic attack prior to the film's start.
the only one that was news to me, but its a biggie is - TESTAMENT - because nuke films are usually a subset of disaster films, wherein the serious message gets lost in the human desire to wallow in others' disasters if onlhy for 90 minutes...
It such such an achingly painful movie on the smallest scale.
I remember - too vividly - two scenes that wrecked me when I first saw it.
I can imagine the ones. Ye gods.
Maybe not essential, but THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN (1979) deserves a mention: a disaffected middle-school chemistry teacher in late 70s Tokyo contrives to build an atomic bomb in his tiny apartment. He succeeds, but then what. There's romance, intrigue, chase scenes, and escalating gags. The look and sound are propulsive and pop, anticipating much 80s stuff on MTV and in French cinema du look. It stands askance in its ultra distanced view of the bomb and its meaning from the other Japanese movies mentioned. It's more than worth a watch, though my impression is it's hard to see. I was lucky to go to a recent screening of an original 35mm print at the Japan Society in New York, where it really popped.
"Testament" in my opinion is too flawed to merit inclusion when it's covering poorly the same ground as "The Day After." The filmmakers on "Testament" genuinely seem to have no idea of the reality of what they're trying to portray: fallout is expressed as one morning a few days after the bombs the plates they take out of closed cabinets have gotten dusty. Or they fret about the possible radioactive contamination of milk in a carton in their fridge that was bought prior to the bombs falling. It might work for someone who doesn't know anything about the topic, but the basic factual errors took me out of it.
I'm also not sure "House of Dynamite" is good enough to stand on its own, but it probably deserves some credit for tackling the topic at a time when it's not much in the public mind.
I mean, the latter could just be the characters vaguely remembering "milk tainted by radiation" and not know how anything works. The dust I couldn't remember being literally fallout, maybe it was symbolic, but I've played a lot of Fallout video games, so wacky radiation doesn't bother me anyway. You're literally the first person I have ever seen to critique that movie.
The children dying slowly and at different times is so horrendous.
Although it's in the allegorical or metaphorical category that you excluded from the list, The Birds captures the feelings of helplessness and dread that the arms race provokes.
The Bed Sitting Room gets so little mention, but is so brilliant.
I assume you are omitting documentaries. If not, I liked "The Man Who Saved the World," which sheds light on close calls; another good reason to get rid of nuclear weapons. Or odd categories like films or series based on video games, like Fallout, which I just found very entertaining; fun fact: parts of it were filmed in the Namibian Desert, which is a natural-looking hell-scape.
Maybe it's because I was both a Nevil Shutte and Gregory Peck fan, but On the Beach affected me the most, or rather, did the most harm to me personally, mainly due to fanning the unrealistic and implausible doomsday narrative, which also feeds the ongoing primacy bias established by the Americans in the last months of World War II and the opening years of the Cold War.
I think every one of these films, starting with On the Beach, needs to be debunked as thoroughly as possible, some more than others. Most are certainly fear-mongering, but all leave the issue of the efficacy of nuclear weapons unquestioned, elevating them to god-like status, which makes practical solutions that do not rely solely on moral suasion that much harder to argue or implement.
In the early 1950s, the Japanese Teachers Union commissioned two films in the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The 1952 drama film "Children of Hiroshima"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Hiroshima
and the 1953 docudrama "Hiroshima." Be sure not to overlook these valuable works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(1953_film)
Note: Wikipedia's entries contain spoilers.
Just watched When the Wind Blows. I was hesitant as its animation but wow this was moving and succinct. Powerful and can’t stop thinking about it.