When you've seen one nuclear war ...
Oct. 23rd, 2011 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prunesquallormdIt's a few weeks since I finally watched the last half of Threads, but seeing as how it took me 27 years between watching the first episode and the second, I'm figuring that a few weeks makes very little odds.
Most of you are way too young to have seen it the first time around, but I was (does the maths. LOL I suck at maths) 12 in 1984, so I was exactly the right age for it to terrify me more than anything I've ever seen, before or since, which is well demonstrated by the fact that it's remained seared into my memory and imagination for a quarter of a century. And, well, I've been meaning to watch the rest of it ever since it was released on DVD, if only to just get it out of my system and move on.
The idea of actually watching something that scared me so much, though, seemed more than a little masochistic, so to lessen the impact as much as possible I did what I never usually do and spoilered myself completely for the rest of the story. It did the job because, either because the fear of full-scale nuclear war has receded significantly or knowing what happened before I saw it reduced its power to terrify and shock, I actually managed to see it without having nightmares (not something I managed the first time).
I'm going to post a link to the download below, for those of you who are feeling curious or masochistic, but, for fair warning (if the foregoing wasn't enough) here are my thoughts, half a life-time later.
First off, the fact that I watched it on a bad quality download and on a tiny laptop screen, while again it reduced the impact, also served to hide any failings of special effects and the comparatively poor production values of 80s television, because it's still as entirely plausible and harrowing as it was when it was first screened. Yes, it's dated, but only in the way that TV from the time always does - the hair, the clothes, the cars, Leslie Judd playing a newsreader! - and obviously the flashes of foreign news that play mostly in the background for the first half are dated by the Cold War references.
The first half follows two families in Sheffield, brought together by a young, expecting couple. As we follow them through unplanned pregnancy, engagement, finding a place and a whole bunch of other perfectly everyday things, the real horror plays in the background, in newspaper headlines half seen, radio reports flicked through on the way to music channels, snippets of conversation. And the prologue to the Apocalypse goes something like this: for reasons I don't recall or we don't catch (a revolution, perhaps?) Soviet troops are sent into Iran, and - with documentary style voiceover explaining the chilling of relations between the US and Russia - the US responds, after a bit of shield-beating on both sides, with a reciprocal invasion. So far, so small-scale, and this is where the only really implausible bit comes in because, as the voice-over relates, at one point in the hostilities, the USSR responds to a US bombing raid with a missile tipped with a single small-ish nuclear warhead (they don't say how small, but it wouldn't take much - Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, was "only" about 15 kilotons). The yield is irrelevant, it's the obvious risk of escalation that's the point. No-one was ever insane enough to use one of the many, many 'strategic' nuclear weapons that have been developed, almost certainly for that reason.
(As an aside, although an entirely related one, this video, a test-firing of the world's one and only (I hope!) atomic cannon, is one of the scariest things I've ever seen:
/aside ends).
The US responds in kind, but the news is hushed up, to leak slowly in the press over the next few weeks.
Relations worsen until the day the world basically ends.
Sheffield was fingered as a target in the first few minutes of the film when the city's main industry (steel, chemicals etc) were listed, purely, apparently, for informational purposes. That list of industries is repeated as the minute-by-minute narrative of a pre-emptive nuclear strike is discussed in ticker-type across the screen and, as our heroes go about their business early on a Sheffield morning, the 4 minute warning sounds, panic ensues and a mushroom cloud bursts in the distance.
That was how the first of the two episodes ended, and, at 12 years old, nothing in heaven and earth would have induced me to watch the second episode. That was probably a very good choice because it's brutal. The attack itself is related in relentless detail - there are a whole bunch of facts and figures (total yield of weapons exchanged (~3000 megatons), total that falls on the UK (~210 megatons), all sorts of other stuff that I cant recall) but obviously it's images that are the most affecting and even now I found them not at all over-done (the melting milk bottles are probably the most famous image, together with the shot of the woman who loses control of her bladder in the terror of seeing that first mushroom cloud).
The rest of the episode telescopes time over the next 13 years or so (by which time, we're told, the population of the UK will have reached medieval levels (maybe 4 million-ish) with a similar level of civilisation. The very last scene shows the 13 year-old daughter of the couple we meet right at the beginning (he died in the attack, she was unlucky enough to survive) being handed the body of her own, still-born, child. She opens her mouth to scream as she sees it and the credits roll in silence.
None of this rather clumsy description conveys the effect it has even now, and it certainly can't do the slightest justice to how scared I was when I first saw the opening 45 minutes or so.
If you're feeling like seeing something bleak, frightening and completely without hope then give it a look.
In the end, though, the only thing it really teaches you is something that you probably already knew: if you're unlucky enough to be alive when the nuclear missiles start flying, pray to every god you know that you're killed instantaneously in the first strike because you really don't want to have to live through what will follow after.
Hee, after all that, I'm pretty certain that absolutely no one will download this, but whatever, here you go:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/51c9alpwgdaiv6d/threads%20%28nuclearwarmovie%20conflict%20discharge%20crass%29.avi
Enjoy! (Although that really is not the word to use here ...
Most of you are way too young to have seen it the first time around, but I was (does the maths. LOL I suck at maths) 12 in 1984, so I was exactly the right age for it to terrify me more than anything I've ever seen, before or since, which is well demonstrated by the fact that it's remained seared into my memory and imagination for a quarter of a century. And, well, I've been meaning to watch the rest of it ever since it was released on DVD, if only to just get it out of my system and move on.
The idea of actually watching something that scared me so much, though, seemed more than a little masochistic, so to lessen the impact as much as possible I did what I never usually do and spoilered myself completely for the rest of the story. It did the job because, either because the fear of full-scale nuclear war has receded significantly or knowing what happened before I saw it reduced its power to terrify and shock, I actually managed to see it without having nightmares (not something I managed the first time).
I'm going to post a link to the download below, for those of you who are feeling curious or masochistic, but, for fair warning (if the foregoing wasn't enough) here are my thoughts, half a life-time later.
First off, the fact that I watched it on a bad quality download and on a tiny laptop screen, while again it reduced the impact, also served to hide any failings of special effects and the comparatively poor production values of 80s television, because it's still as entirely plausible and harrowing as it was when it was first screened. Yes, it's dated, but only in the way that TV from the time always does - the hair, the clothes, the cars, Leslie Judd playing a newsreader! - and obviously the flashes of foreign news that play mostly in the background for the first half are dated by the Cold War references.
The first half follows two families in Sheffield, brought together by a young, expecting couple. As we follow them through unplanned pregnancy, engagement, finding a place and a whole bunch of other perfectly everyday things, the real horror plays in the background, in newspaper headlines half seen, radio reports flicked through on the way to music channels, snippets of conversation. And the prologue to the Apocalypse goes something like this: for reasons I don't recall or we don't catch (a revolution, perhaps?) Soviet troops are sent into Iran, and - with documentary style voiceover explaining the chilling of relations between the US and Russia - the US responds, after a bit of shield-beating on both sides, with a reciprocal invasion. So far, so small-scale, and this is where the only really implausible bit comes in because, as the voice-over relates, at one point in the hostilities, the USSR responds to a US bombing raid with a missile tipped with a single small-ish nuclear warhead (they don't say how small, but it wouldn't take much - Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, was "only" about 15 kilotons). The yield is irrelevant, it's the obvious risk of escalation that's the point. No-one was ever insane enough to use one of the many, many 'strategic' nuclear weapons that have been developed, almost certainly for that reason.
(As an aside, although an entirely related one, this video, a test-firing of the world's one and only (I hope!) atomic cannon, is one of the scariest things I've ever seen:
/aside ends).
The US responds in kind, but the news is hushed up, to leak slowly in the press over the next few weeks.
Relations worsen until the day the world basically ends.
Sheffield was fingered as a target in the first few minutes of the film when the city's main industry (steel, chemicals etc) were listed, purely, apparently, for informational purposes. That list of industries is repeated as the minute-by-minute narrative of a pre-emptive nuclear strike is discussed in ticker-type across the screen and, as our heroes go about their business early on a Sheffield morning, the 4 minute warning sounds, panic ensues and a mushroom cloud bursts in the distance.
That was how the first of the two episodes ended, and, at 12 years old, nothing in heaven and earth would have induced me to watch the second episode. That was probably a very good choice because it's brutal. The attack itself is related in relentless detail - there are a whole bunch of facts and figures (total yield of weapons exchanged (~3000 megatons), total that falls on the UK (~210 megatons), all sorts of other stuff that I cant recall) but obviously it's images that are the most affecting and even now I found them not at all over-done (the melting milk bottles are probably the most famous image, together with the shot of the woman who loses control of her bladder in the terror of seeing that first mushroom cloud).
The rest of the episode telescopes time over the next 13 years or so (by which time, we're told, the population of the UK will have reached medieval levels (maybe 4 million-ish) with a similar level of civilisation. The very last scene shows the 13 year-old daughter of the couple we meet right at the beginning (he died in the attack, she was unlucky enough to survive) being handed the body of her own, still-born, child. She opens her mouth to scream as she sees it and the credits roll in silence.
None of this rather clumsy description conveys the effect it has even now, and it certainly can't do the slightest justice to how scared I was when I first saw the opening 45 minutes or so.
If you're feeling like seeing something bleak, frightening and completely without hope then give it a look.
In the end, though, the only thing it really teaches you is something that you probably already knew: if you're unlucky enough to be alive when the nuclear missiles start flying, pray to every god you know that you're killed instantaneously in the first strike because you really don't want to have to live through what will follow after.
Hee, after all that, I'm pretty certain that absolutely no one will download this, but whatever, here you go:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/51c9alpwgdaiv6d/threads%20%28nuclearwarmovie%20conflict%20discharge%20crass%29.avi
Enjoy! (Although that really is not the word to use here ...
