This TV movie from the 1980s helped change the course of the Cold War. Here’s how ‘The Day After’ got made
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/09/entertainment/the-day-after-abc-movie-cec/index.html
This TV movie from the 1980s helped change the course of the Cold War. Here’s how ‘The Day After’ got made
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/09/entertainment/the-day-after-abc-movie-cec/index.html
6 comments
Mirror for the submitted article: https://archive.ph/E2rYG
I watched this movie for the first time recently and thought it was very good. Introducing characters, families and settings just to show them vaporized and instantly gone – no hope of saving them, no miraculous appearances from people that were expected to die as often happens in movies and TV – was very impactful. There were still heavy themes of American optimism and the idea of surviving and persevering through anything.
Then I watched Threads, which was shown on the BBC in England the following year. Threads is much darker and bleaker, and in my opinion therefore more realistic. There weren’t swaths of people coming together to pull the country up by the bootstraps and perform operations by flashlight using water sterilized by boiling on a tiny hot plate. I think the behavior depicted after the nuclear attacks in Threads – people looking out only for themselves and their own family, stealing food and looting often aggressively so because they realize no one is coming to save them – is what would really happen, regardless of which country one was in. And Threads shows the repercussions years into the future, which I think felt the most grim to me. The Day After ends after only a few weeks, obviously many people were headed for death due to radiation but not showing that makes it feel less connected or real. I had mentally naively assumed in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, the US military and support organizations would heroically show up to take over and rebuild. But in either of the wars/attacks depicted in The Day After and Threads, there isn’t likely to be enough military and personnel to come rescue anyone. Everyone is on their own, and nothing will ever be like it was, and that reality is what should be shown in this type of media.
That scared 12 yr old me more than anything else.
I remember my science teacher showed us this in school in 1996. I was scarred. I have had very vivid nightmares about nuclear war ever since!
I just re-watched this movie last week. It was scary then and it’s still scary now.
Didn’t Rocky 4 end the cold war?