Apocalypse Then

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 29 Comments

As found on a SomethingAwful.com forum thread, and courtesy of YouTube, this is in its entirety, “The War Game”.

“The War Game” is a British mock documentary from 1965 that was never shown on television at the time because it was deemed too horrifying. It describes in loving detail the impact of a nuclear strike on a completely unprepared UK. Since it wasn’t aired until 20 years after its filming, it’s somewhat hard to find, so I suspect for most of you this will be the first time you’ve seen it. More modern films that have followed such as The Day After, Testament, Threads and the recent Children of Men all borrow liberally from this movie, though The War Game is far more intense than any of these. For those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s, this was our future.

Below the cut, the hour-long “The War Game”, in five parts. You may want to see something lighthearted afterwards. I recommend Shrek.

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  • internetjack

    I remember The Day After from the 6th grade. Scarred my mind pretty good as a 12 year old. Our school even advised all the students not to watch it, or at least with your parents, and then had an extra counselor on hand for a few days after if anyone was freaked out.

    I’ll never forget my friend at the time. Huge mama’s boy, in bed at 9pm every night. For some reason he couldn’t get it in his head that they were advising us to *not* watch it, and kept asking the teacher things like, “So you’ll understand if we are tired tomorrow from staying up late to watch it?” Teacher, “WTF?” Hah, funny to remember that. His parents didn’t let him watch it. Smart parents.

    Not sure if I want to watch something more depressing than that.

    Cheers

  • http://www.worldiv.com Tuebit

    Along a similar line, I recall watching “When the Wind Blows”, an animated version of the book of the same name. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090315/) It’s about a older couple in the days after nuclear devastation. What a movie. It’s not so much intense as it is heart wrenching. It’s been something on the order of 20 years since I saw it and I can still remember how it made me feel.

    Thanks for the youtube links. I must now watch and be horrified by the things that could have been.

  • Bob

    Good film.

    This reminds me, in a tangential sort of way, of Battle of San Pietro (http://www.archive.org/details/battle_of_san_pietro) made and narrated by John Huston. The War Dept. would not accept the movie because they felt it too severely depicted the cost of the battle.

  • Freakazoid

    I had to watch the day after in 5th grade. We were only allowed to watch the first half of it or something, basically up to the point where the bombs exploded, then the teacher stopped it and just described to us what would happen after it and the choices we would have to make.

    Kinda took the oomph out of the film’s message, but they probably did it to prevent anyone from being fucked up.

    I saw threads last night. That is probably in my top 5 creepiest films I’ve seen in my life. I think it even beats the war game, although war game is more informative.

  • internetjack

    Oh, btw, On the Beach deserves a mention here. Book about folks in Australia, waiting for nuclear winter/radiation to come to the southern hemisphere after the northern hemisphere has destroyed itself, and how they decide to occupy their final time on the planet. At one point the government sponsors a program of passing out cyanide shots(or some kinda poison) so you don’t have to leave your children to suffer/die after you. Pretty much a classic.

    Cheers!

  • http://overmoderated.blogspot.com/ Rich Weil

    Glad someone mentioned On the Beach. I’m kind of an apocalypse fiction collector / officionado and that is way at the top of my list.

    Very chilling, pathetic and touching.

  • Nicademus

    I found it to be overly optimistic if anything. Reducing the analysis down to 1 kiloton weapons when even then the blasts would have been much much larger.

    Most of the problems list would have been moot since the people wouldn’t have lived to go through them, but for the unlucky few.

  • http://blog.driftlogic.net Scott

    Thanks for this. I had never actually heard of this.

    I made some friends sit down and watch Threads and The Day After, thankfully in that order, about 6 months ago.

    No other movie has disturbed me like Threads.

  • http://http:/www.edgecase.net/devsite Cael

    I second Tuebit’s comments. When the Wind Blows is heartbreaking, not because of the bombs and the radiation but because there’s ths couple doing everything they’ve been told to do by their government and it’s all utterly worthless.

    Total betrayal. It hurts to watch but if you can, i’d recommend it.

  • Gar

    yup, now I gotta go watch Shrek.

  • Hanna

    It may still be our future. There’s talk about using nuclear weapons on Iran to stop them from building a nuclear weapon. This movie is somewhat unique in that it brings up the topic of the West retaliating (in kind) to an attack and just how wrong it is to do so.

    Yes, the Soviet Union isn’t the Great Threat that it was made out to be. But there are still many dangerous people with nuclear weapons and that includes America and Great Britain and France and Israel.

    Who in their right mind would visit this kind of horror on anyone?

    I hope someday the people of the world will realize how close we are to committing these atrocities. I hope we’ll stop ourselves from playing this very dangerous “game”.

    Nobody wins.

    Love,

    Hanna

  • Kohs

    Children of Men was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while. I suggest everyone see that one.

    Also, when you said “mock documentary”, I was expecting something by Christopher Guest… haha.

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    For those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s, this was our future.

    No way, man. That’s what fantasy and sci-fi were for. A different future. Or failing that, magic.

    :)

    I really was confounded by The Fall of Colossus, because Dr. Forbin wanted to shut it off.

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    For those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s, this was our future.

    No way, man. That’s what fantasy and sci-fi were for. A different future. Or failing that, magic.

    :)

    I really was confounded by The Fall of Colossus, because Dr. Forbin wanted to shut it off.

    picture

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    Hanna, we can handle a nuke here and there. Probably lots of them. Worse things have happened to us humans, we’re a hearty bunch.

    Full-scale nuclear war between the US and USSR would have killed everybody, everywhere.

    Quite a different thing that even the destruction of major cities (which few can imagine these days, I guess, ‘cept old dudes who were in WW2, and saw it).

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Jeff,

    Hardly alone though. Dystopian novels and stories of the late 60′s and early 70′s were typically nasty and bleak.

    Have you ever read John Brunner’s _Stand on Zanzibar_ or Harlan Ellison’s _I have no mouth but I must scream_? (Take “nasty and bleak” above as a clear warning, imcidentally)

  • scottj

    > Hanna, we can handle a nuke here
    > and there. Probably lots of them.

    A single nuclear weapon exploded in the right place (the upper atmosphere) would destroy every non-military-shielded integrated circuit in North America.

    No computers, thus no economy (markets and banks lose their records). No cars (every car since the 60s has a computerized starter system).

    That wouldn’t *destroy* the world, but it would set it back to (optimistically) the nineteenth century.

    More weapons – a “limited exchange” – would cause climate change that would make today’s “global warming” look positively pacific. An agricultural collapse would revert society to the middle ages. No food – no government – no organization – no technology.

    Probably one of the more realistic looks at the effects of a limited nuclear war ironically came from a role playing game, specifically Twilight 2000. Only a few cities were hit, mostly military targets in Europe and oil refineries in America. Two years later, food production came to a halt due to a slight climate change resulting in a massive drought, compounded by a failed US government split into two feuding halves being unable to respond effectively. The result was one of the grimmest RPG supplements ever, which listed month-by-month when each American settlement died off.

    Of course, given a full-scale US-USSR nuclear blowout, the world itself would be a barren firestormed shell, so I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. I remember a fallout map listing the only place safe from fallout in the event of a full nuclear exchange – southern Oregon. Not coincidentally, several large survivalist groups relocated there immediately. The 80s were fun!

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    That wouldn’t *destroy* the world, but it would set it back to (optimistically) the nineteenth century.

    Much of the world hasn’t even gotten there yet.

    I think we’re only a good corn-blight away from one hell of a famine. Or a super-flu away from global chaos.

    No question even a limited exchange would suck. Heck, just LA or NY being nuked would change our whole nation.

    But we’d get through a lot, as a species.

    For those of us that grew up in the 70s and 80s, our future was extinction.

  • Boanerges

    Well consider that, for 40ish years, we lived with the horror of nuclear annihilation. It produced some interesting and sometimes zany sci-fi, tho. Consider Planet of the Apes post-post-post-apocalypse (“You blew it all up!”) or Burgess Merideth’s immortal Twilight Zone episode where his bookworm character alone survives the apocalypse but breaks his glasses (“No! There was time now…”). I believe On the Beach was made into a movie.

    My personal favorite was a stand-up Robin Williams did in the late 70s (was on Comedy Central a few times). He pretends to be an old man and, in the middle of an otherwise hilarious sketch, gets pretty philosophical. Best quote was “Do you remember World War III? All 3 seconds of it. Remember Carter’s last speech? ‘Ya on ya own. Good night.’”

  • http://jpsaunders.co.uk Ghiest

    The Brittish have long been obsessed with total destruction as a theme for movies and books, I personally have had a long morbid fascination with post apocolyptic visions of our future be it from books, films and computer games.

    I hear there is a mmorpg in the works based around that twilight 2000, but it’s possibly/is vapourware at the moment, I’d love to see it otherwise :)

  • http://www.lietcam.com Lietgardis

    “An agricultural collapse would revert society to the middle ages. No food – no government – no organization – no technology.”

    Dies the Fire is a pretty awful book about how that situation would cause the SCA to rise and rule the world.

    No, really.

  • sinij

    I think all-out nuclear war did not happen because people with access to The Red Button seen movies like that. One thing is to know what results of nuclear war going to be and another being shown it in such gruesome details.

  • Carson

    I don’t know what the fuck my school was thinking. Just as I entered grade 8, at the tender age of 12… at a Catholic school… we were required to watch Threads as part of our English class.

    It scared the shit out of me – terrified. It was so horrible that I couldn’t watch it, but of course by not watching I’d probably be viewed as a looser or whatever so I just took off my glasses. I’m totally blind without them. I saw the first half of the movie, but just could not handle the second half (in a subsequent class, it was divided in two I guess). So…I heard the horror, but saw nothing but a blur.

    One thing I remember very clearly, when at home playing outside with friends if a plane flew overhead that I could hear… I literally stopped and my heart raced.

    Who the hell makes these kind of decisions to play this shit to kids – I wasn’t even a teenager for god’s sakes.

  • Evangolis

    What, no Dr. Strangelove? How quickly people forget the need to protect our precious bodily fluids.

    End Game was a nice end of the world play. And my dad and some other professors from the college explaining to folks just exactly how a nuclear blast would convert the ‘bomb shelters’ contractors were hawking into ovens.

    Now MAD isn’t enough deterrence. I expect we’ll survive the worst, but it won’t be any fun at all.

  • Toastrider

    There was a television special called ‘Without Warning’, about an imminent asteroid impact on Earth, done in ‘real time’ as if it was an actual TV news report.

    I remember how utterly horrifying it was, as it turned out /someone/ out there didn’t like us, and when we diverted the first asteroid, they sent a whole metric load of them to bombard the planet.

    Creepy.

    –TR

  • JHB

    “Alas, Babylon” by Pat Frank was also a novel that dealt with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. Written in 1959, it took a slightly more optimistic view of the post-holocaust survivor’s lives (if you can call being bombed back into the dark ages as optimistic). “Malevil” was another in the same genre that I remember.

    On a different note, I remember about 20 years ago there was a TV docudrama about a nuclear bomb going off in Charleston NC. They used actual newscasters as part of the cast. I was channel surfing and happened to tune in just as these familiar news-anchors were reporting the bomb going off. I still remember the feeling of dread and thinking “Oh hell, the genie’s out of the bottle now!”. I rushed out of the room to tell the rest of my family and was roundly laughed at. Apparently it was a re-run and everyone else had seen the whole thing 6 months earlier. I’m sure Orson Welles would have approved…

  • http://www.plutospage.com/wow Yunk

    I don’t see many US leaders, even Bush, actually using a nuclear weapon (at least not beyond a few KT). But of course the *threat* must be there, or no one would take us seriously.

    As far as I know only France has actually threatened to use them, as in “if you attack us we will utterly destroy your entire country” a few years ago to Iran I believe.

  • Amaranthar

    I’m old enough to remember actually having a daily practice of crawling under you desk in case of an atomic attack. Actually we only did it once, then someone said the oft applied “yeah, and while your there, kiss yer ass goodbye”. The teacher just kind of nodded in agreement and we didn’t waste time on that anymore.

    But what was really horrifying once was at home as I came running down the stairs, the TV was on and a movie about an atomic attack was running. I came down just in time to hear what looked and sounded just like a real network news ancorman saying things like
    “This is for real”,
    “Russia has declaired war and launched an array of atnomic weaponry at the USA”,
    and “The president of the United States will be speaking soon.”

    I stopped in my tracks, went very cold, and thought it was very real. It sucked not only because I knew I was going to die in the next few hours, but because I knew that everything I knew anything about was about to be erased permanently from history……

    …..Then the movie turned into a movie and I blinked a few times…..

  • http://www.survival-preparation.com D A Nicholson

    I find it interesting that Governmental Panels are now warming that Nuclear Terrorism is on the rise (see: http://www.survival-preparation.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=21) and that the Doomsday Clock has been shifted closer to midnight (see: http://www.survival-preparation.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=17). Maybe we should all watch this to see our possible future.

    It was interesting to watch it just to see a more well behaved society any-way.

    Thanks for highlighting this film.