Summary:
A mockumentary about the long-term effects of a nuclear holocaust on the occupants of Sheffield, England.
My Thoughts:
If you’ve listened to the True Myth Media Podcast over the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard me raving about HBO’s latest miniseries Chernobyl, which documents the events after the Nuclear Power Plant accident in 1986 (for more on that series see our article Chernobyl: The Cost of Lies). While I’ve always had an interest in post apocalyptic films like “Mad Max: The Road Warrior” or “Book of Eli”, watching Chernobyl has really reinvigorated that interest, and I find myself going out of the way to watch movies I’ve long put off.
“Threads” was a movie that I had heard only great things for a long time, but I had always put off watching it. While I enjoy post apocalyptic fiction, I didn’t know if I would enjoy a dramatization of what would really happen; watching Chernobyl changed that perception pretty quickly. While “Threads” is a made for TV movie and there are moments that suffer from obvious budgetary restraints and some dated effects, topics, and themes (Russia and the US aren’t that close to nuclear war anymore), this movie is probably the most realistic depiction of nuclear fallout I’ve seen. This movie doesn’t fill an arid landscape with tricked out cars and leather-clad raiders (“Mad Max: Fury Road”), nor does it rip the skies asunder and fill the streets with mutants akin to zombies (“28 Days Later”). It shows people as they would be during a nuclear attack: they’re frightened, directionless, and ultimately powerless to do anything.
What makes “Threads” stand out from other narrative-based storylines, and what makes this film incredibly memorable, is the structure of the story and also the direness and hopelessness of the message. For the first forty minutes of the film, we get glimpses of a fictionalized political climate rife with turmoil. The political tensions, while heightened in this world, are obviously playing on the US/Russian Cold War, which was still quite prevalent in 1984 when this movie was released. As these tensions rise we watch a young girlfriend and boyfriend Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher, “28 Weeks Later”) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale, “Hamlet (1996)”) navigating the streets of their hometown, not paying too much attention to the turmoil outside of that which affects their daily life; Ruth is pregnant, and that seems to take up most of their time allotted for worrying.
And then, quite suddenly there’s an attack and everything changes. The way that this attack is handled is absolutely brilliant. It’s jarring and disorienting; we get glimpses of the attack itself, of emergency responses, of Jimmy and Ruth’s separate stories (and fates) as they try to avoid the attack.
The final hour of the film sort of documents what it would be like for the survivors. Death quickly becomes a pervasive force in the survivors’ lives. This world is not a world of hope but one of hopelessness. As the film goes on, we are given glimpses of what happened to the outside world through title cards that give casualty numbers and other facts about the world after the war. The film gives reasonable estimations of how many people would die and how, it gives estimations of how the soil and waters would be tainted, of how birth defects would be on the rise, of how lawlessness would undoubtedly start to prevail.
Verdict:
This is a grim and frightening film, but that was its intended goal. This movie was not meant to hold the hands of those looking for hope in a world after nuclear war, it’s meant to paint a realistic picture of a world that will hopefully never come to be. From a filmmaking standpoint, the structure of this film is pretty unique, and I actually think it works wonders in helping to drive the point of the film home. Overall, I absolutely recommend this film, particularly if you’ve an interest in post-apocalyptic fiction or if you’re looking for what might be the most realistic depiction of nuclear fallout I personally have seen brought to screen.
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