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THREADS [message #115605] Wed, 18 September 2013 18:10
leeper is currently offline  leeper
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Message-ID: <436@ahuta.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 9-Feb-85 17:54:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ahuta.436
Posted: Sat Feb  9 17:54:43 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Feb-85 05:53:12 EST
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
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Xref: watmath net.movies:5648 net.sf-lovers:6094


                                  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
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