The world's most-read Scottish politics website

Wings Over Scotland


We’re all DOOMED!

Posted on January 15, 2010 by

There’s been something of a Biblical flood of the-end-of-civilisation movies in recent years. From 2007’s 28 Weeks Later (zombie plague) and I Am Legend (cancer cure gone wrong) to Charlie Brooker’s harrowing alleged comedy Dead Set (another zombie plague), the BBC’s remake of Survivors (lethal virus pandemic) and the same broadcaster’s re-remake of The Day Of The Triffids (er, homicidal walking plants), 2009 mega-budget effects-fest 2012 (the classic “solar flares cause planet to boil from the inside”), and right up to this year’s The Road (unnamed catastrophic event), the cultural world is suddenly alive with the mass culling of humanity. Hurrah!

The one avenue for the obliteration of mankind that hasn’t been explored for a while is the classic nuclear holocaust, even though – or possibly because – an increasingly aggressive and powerful Russia has been rattling its sabre on the world stage for the first time in two decades. However, with the imminent The Book Of Eli making reference to a war that leaves the planet a ravaged wasteland, it looks like the atomic menace is back, Back, BACK! Which got WoSland thinking – what's the bleakest nuclear holocaust movie ever?

5. THE WAR GAME (Peter Watkins, BBC, 1965) The War Game is perhaps the most famous of all the apocalypse movies. Ostensibly a play, the drama-documentary was made in 1965 and scheduled for transmission on the 21st anniversary of the atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima (6 August 1966), but wasn’t broadcast until almost 20 years later, in 1985, because it was deemed either too horrifying or too political, depending on who you believe.

Starting with a rather weak premise for events (the USSR and East Germany sealing off and occupying West Berlin “in order to show collective Communist support for the Chinese invasion of South Vietnam”, against which the US are said to be planning to use tactical nuclear weapons), The War Game gets going with scenes of a rather quaint mass evacuation of women, children and the disabled to rural parts of the country, where they’re received by reluctant householders with some charmingly old-fashioned British racism (“Are they coloured?”).

The film piles on the gloom early on, with the clipped tones of the BBC narrator (one of three used in the film, including Michael Aspel) pointing out that many of the places evacuees would be sent to would be rendered lethally uninhabitable anyway in the event of war by radioactive fallout.

(At this point we’re also introduced to what will be a recurring theme in TWG, namely vox-pop segments in which various members of the public are interviewed in the street and demonstrate their total ignorance of such issues – one woman, on being asked if she knows what Strontium-90 is, replies “I’ve no idea, really. I know it’s some sort of gunpowder or something, that blows up”. It’s never clear whether any these vox pops were real or staged by actors – some of them are obviously fictional, as they’re set during the film’s state of emergency, but there’s an implication that others feature genuine citizens.)

The War Game is much shorter than any of the other major apocalypse movies, at just 46 minutes, so it can’t afford to hang around and the actual attack takes place after a mere 15 minutes of scene-setting. (It’s implied that US forces use battlefield nuclear weapons first, as part of at attempt to reach West Berlin, and the situation then escalates into full-scale war as the Soviets launch all their inter-continental ballistic missiles in order to prevent them from being destroyed in a first strike.)

In one of the movie’s less subtle political comments, we experience it with a family who “couldn’t afford to build a refuge”, and the first victims suffer melted eyeballs in the back garden before the blast wave – which we’re told shortly afterwards “has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of Hell” – destroys their terraced house.

There are some more grisly scenes of the immediate attack (a small child further away from the explosion is blinded by the flash, then there’s an extended sequence of a firestorm with a family burning to death in their car and firemen and civilians dying of heatstroke and suffocation as the firestorm consumes all the oxygen around them.

We move on swiftly through the gruesome business of triage at an emergency hospital (including a chilling scene of policemen carrying out mercy killings of those who’ve been deemed untreatable), mass cremations of bodies, buckets full of wedding rings retrieved from the dead, food riots, mob killings and executions of looters, all set against a backdrop of rubble-strewn ruins.

This middle section – apart from an unfortunate outbreak of poetry at 34 minutes – is the most powerful in the film. Compared to the more expansive, professional footage of earlier, it’s all shot at close quarters with a shaky camera, to convey the comparatively precarious state of civilisation after the attack. It’s a clever technique from a movie made on a very low budget, subtly getting across humanity’s diminished condition without having to have the narrators spell it out, and drawing the viewer immediately down into the newly-primitive world of the survivors.

The last few minutes let the movie down a bit, with some amateurish polemic and some unintentionally comic footage of how Watkins perceived the reactions of the poor dumb working classes to the post-apocalypse world, alongside a prediction that such a war would probably take place by 1980. But still, by the standards of 1965 it's a chilling piece of work.

BLEAKNESS RATING: 5/10 Political bias and dubious sources dilute the effect somewhat, some parts are unintentionally funny and it’s also mercifully-short, but it’s still pretty grim.

Clicking on any of the pics above will take you to a YouTube playlist where you can watch the entire movie. Tune in soon [EDIT: clearly not all that soon] for the 4th-bleakest nuclear holocaust movie of all time!

1 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. 15 01 10 15:47

    Nuclear War

0 to “We’re all DOOMED!”

  1. Are you including TV movies? If so, Threads has got to be number one. I’d caught bits of that in the past, but watched the entire thing one (extended) lunchtime a couple of years back. Just about the bleakest thing I’ve ever watched, and I didn’t get a whole lot of work done that afternoon.

    Reply
  2. Bear or bust says:

    Will you be covering the Protect and Survive Public information films, I don’t know if they’ll qualify as being bleak enough though.

    Reply
  3. marlon says:

    It’s gotta be “Threads” all the way. “Bleak” doesn’t even come CLOSE.

    Reply
  4. Snackspot says:

    Most apocalyptically of all – you’ve seen who wrote The Book Of Eli? (caution, “spoiler”: link to thefilmstage.com …)

    Reply
  5. RevStu says:

    Oh my FG.

    Reply
  6. Xeethra says:

    A bit of a sidetrack (as I forgot it was an article about nuclear holocausts*) but I watched ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ (Life out of Balance) last night: it’s one of the bleakest films I’ve ever seen. A bewildering journey through human existence; I won’t say much more because I don’t really know what to say. There are fragments on YouTube but it deserves to be watched, upscaled if possible, in a dark room on your own.

    *Hmmm: it does feature footage of nuclear tests though. Damn my shoddy memory.

    Reply
  7. Kev says:

    The 1965 vox pop could well be real. The public were left deliberately ignorant of what was going on. I doubt anyone but a physicist would have a chance of knowing what Strontium was then. Duck and cover, etc.
     
    The police back then were told in training that the plan for nuclear war was that the policemen were to abandon their families as soon as they got the early warning (before the public) that something was about to happen and then go to the hills where they'd shelter out the disaster of bombs falling and everything being destroyed and then return to the cities to enforce law and order on whatever survived (that's after poking their rad counter out of the hatch every now and then to see if it was safe), organising digging mass graves, ensuring the rule of law and order, etc.  I loved the idea that they fully expected the policemen to abandon their own wives and children in an instant to a hideous apocalyptic death and post-apocalytic chaos and that they expected no one to notive all the police vanishing off to the hills.
     
    Naturally the likelihood of the average policemen then obeying these orders were slim to nothing, with almost all of them being amused or disgusted with the training films and nuclear war related information back then.  The modern over the top terror training reminds me of this but refined in its manipulative qualities and sadly its hold on the policemen seems to be far stronger.

    Reply


Comment - please read this page for comment rules. HTML tags like <i> and <b> are permitted. Use paragraph breaks in long comments. DO NOT SIGN YOUR COMMENTS, either with a name or a slogan. If your comment does not appear immediately, DO NOT REPOST IT. Ignore these rules and I WILL KILL YOU WITH HAMMERS.


  • About

    Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)

    Stats: 6,751 Posts, 1,217,244 Comments

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Categories

  • Tags

  • Recent Comments

    • Rev. Stuart Campbell on All Or Nothing: “Yes, I’m considering some polling on this. It’s been a while.May 7, 14:01
    • Rev. Stuart Campbell on All Or Nothing: “If Labour have a safe seat left anywhere in Scotland it’s Edinburgh Southern. If they lose that to the SNP…May 7, 14:00
    • Aidan on All Or Nothing: “Not strictly true, the Scotland Act provides that the abolition of the Scottish Parliament can only be done following a…May 7, 14:00
    • 100%Yes on All Or Nothing: “Holyrood isn’t there for Scotland or its people it only benefits the people who go there to work for the…May 7, 13:56
    • AdamH on All Or Nothing: “Swinney was yesterday’s man yesterdayMay 7, 13:53
    • Tartan Tory on All Or Nothing: “The only thing stopping them is the fear of a backlash. Such has always been the case since it started.May 7, 13:44
    • Ian on All Or Nothing: “Are you doing any polling shortly Stu (or doing a fundraiser for one)? Would be interesting to see the Indy/end…May 7, 13:41
    • Stuart MacKay on All Or Nothing: “Any grifter with half a brain cell knows that Holyrood is a dead-end. The paths that lead to power all…May 7, 13:37
    • Rev. Stuart Campbell on All Or Nothing: “No. But it’d be a terrible look. Doing it with the consent of the Scottish people would be vastly preferable.May 7, 13:36
    • Giesabrek on All Or Nothing: “Is there anything preventing a Reform/Tory government from dismantling Follyrood without Follyrood’s permission?May 7, 13:28
    • Vivian O’Blivion on All Or Nothing: “If I was a campaign manager for anyone other than the SNP in Edinburgh Southern in the run up to…May 7, 13:26
    • Tartan Tory on All Or Nothing: “I’m sorry to say that it needs to get worse in Scotland, a lot worse, before the people will truly…May 7, 13:20
    • Craig on All Or Nothing: “To be honest, I’d rather see the end of Holyrood than seeing the SNP invoking the “Scorched Earth Policy” for…May 7, 13:18
    • 100%Yes on All Or Nothing: “The National has more articles about the Labour party than the daily record, is there a difference in the two…May 7, 13:13
    • Dervheid on All Or Nothing: “There’s now no doubt in my mind that gone the next elections (both Holyrood and UK) Unionists are going to…May 7, 13:13
    • 100%Yes on All Or Nothing: “Please feel free to call me a moron if I’ve got this wrong. But didn’t John Swinney say early on…May 7, 13:02
    • Stuart MacKay on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “Probably, but that’s not the point. Policies are great on paper. Implementing them is another matter. Just look at the…May 7, 12:36
    • Yoon Scum on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “I’d happily bet if you presented Reform policies as SNP policies Most of the Moon howlers would be screaming how…May 7, 11:47
    • Stuart MacKay on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “Never mind, you can always start a cult called Elon’s Gate so when all the unionists, trapped in Socialist Scotland,…May 7, 11:38
    • James Cheyne on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “It is no doubt that certain governments are and have been bringing in disruptive legislation and statues to creat division,…May 7, 11:33
    • Yoon Scum on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “I know that indy has NEVER BEEN CLOSER With that in mind Will English worshipping far right filth like myself…May 7, 11:32
    • Stuart MacKay on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “Core Pledges on page 2 of Reform’s “Our Contract with You” (https://www.reformparty.uk/policies) is pretty compelling if you’re on the lower…May 7, 11:18
    • Alf Baird on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “As a “good little Yoon” you should realise that in an independent Scotland there would be no Farage and therefore…May 7, 10:28
    • Yoon Scum on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “After Scotland leaves the union Will you want Starlink to be banned? As I use starlinkMay 7, 09:59
    • TURABDIN on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “NOWHERE’S SAFE FROM ELON, https://archive.is/p1xZ6 Spy sats in the skies, tons of space junk, freedom & democracy in the trash……May 7, 08:56
    • Robert Hughes on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “” Donald is the poster child for smug, self entitled, middle class humanities graduates who’ve never had a proper job…May 7, 07:57
    • Yoon Scum on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “I’m English and therefore stupid (and evil) care to provide evidence that Reform are bad for the working class?May 7, 07:50
    • Yoon Scum on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “A question for the moon howlers You say that reform is FAR RIGHT You also say to don’t trust the…May 7, 07:17
    • Vivian O’Blivion on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “Another day, another poll showing RefUK ahead of the pack at Westminster. More in Common, Westminster voting intention, field work…May 7, 07:14
    • Vivian O’Blivion on Let’s Make Jen Safe Again: “Dear god! Sally “Gravybus” Donald has been selected to stand in Edinburgh Southern as the SNP candidate for Holyrood 2026.…May 7, 06:41
  • A tall tale



↑ Top