leeper@ahuta.UUCP (leeper) (02/10/85)
THREADS A film review by Mark R. Leeper One of the most frightening films I ever remember seeing is Peter Watkins's Oscar-winning short, THE WAR GAME, which includes some very believable and realistic footage of Britain during and after a nuclear war. We have seen a lot of dramatizations of the effects of nuclear war over the past years or so, including the much bally-hooed THE DAY AFTER. They are all very good at underscoring what a pity it would be to be in a nuclear war. The films we see almost entirely ignore any but the luckiest 5% of the population. They show people whose lives are disrupted and who may eventually die from the effects of the bomb. There is never any mention of things like fire-storms or triage or the millions painfully maimed by the attack. And, incidentally, now that we have conveniently forgotten how terrible nuclear war is, all of a sudden it is once more "thinkable." Now the BBC--who footed the bill for THE WAR GAME but decided it was too frightening to show--has made THREADS, a film about nuclear war that covers some of the same ground. THREADS is sort of a British DAY AFTER with some of the effective moments of THE WAR GAME thrown in. It falls short of THE WAR GAME in several important ways--I'll get to those later--but it is by far the second best film depiction of nuclear war I can remember seeing. Now my measure of quality is for the most part accuracy. TESTAMENT was a very well-made film, beautifully directed with great insights into the characters. But while those characters were believable, the situation was not. The producers failed to do their homework. The characters in THREADS are not nearly as well-developed, but most of what was wrong with THREADS were omissions, not outright inaccuracies. It presents a genuinely possible scenario of nuclear war and its aftermath. Its estimations of the impact of nuclear winter are on the light side, but not entirely outside the range of scientific opinion. Where THREADS falls short of THE WAR GAME is simply that it conveys less information and pulls its punches a bit more. In THREADS we see what is happening and get a few words on the screen explaining it. THE WAR GAME had a dispassionate narrator explaining what was happening. Instead of seeing fires, the narrator explained the nature and scope of a firestorm so that you know what you are seeing is not an isolated fire, but part of a huge mire measured in square miles. In some ways THREADS does tell more than THE WAR GAME, just by virtue of the fact that it has more recent information and that it is longer, so can show more of the aftermath. But for THREADS to fall so close in quality to what I obviously use as the yardstick for nuclear war films, I have to rate THREADS high. Give it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. Mark R. Leeper ...ihnp4!ahuta!leeper