There are a lot of things that count against TDA, like the terribly cheesy effects, stock footage and TV level type acting.
What about the laughable, unrealistic display of society? I refer to the movie as "Waltons in Fallout" (meaning the games) because it's just as cheesy, unrealistic and a typical piece of americana: We take something horrific and make nice, friendly entertainment for the whole family out of it.
Is anybody foolish enough to think how the movie displays the aftermath would be realistic? No violence? No wide-spread chaos? No people going *beep* No murders? No rapes at all? People don't get killed and robbed of their belongings?
Threads in that regard comes across as much more realistic and disturbing and it's depiction about what could happen to a society after a nuclear war isn't that unrealistic, certainly more realistic than TDA.
If the entire world is in a nuclear war, there is no hope, it would be bleak. What do you expect? People crawling out of their basements and bunkers into the radiation and sing Shiny Happy People while rebuilding society as if nothing happened?
When a world wide nuclear war happens, it would take decades upon decades to rebuild and recreate society. During those decades it would be pure chaos and anarchy, survival of the fittest if you will with not a lot of "humanity" and "love" to be found. You can already see such behaviour in every war zone or heck, even during peaceful times, look at what happened during the Olympics: No War Zone but people are so poor and desperate they robbed reporters blind and there were reports of shootings everywhere.
I wouldn't rank TDA even in the Top 5 of movies about nuclear war. Threads is followed by the well made The War Game (Threads is kind of an updated, more movie like version), Pisma myortvogo cheloveka, When the Wind Blows and On the Beach (1959 version)
No, we've never been in a nuclear warbut most of us would have an easier time imagining what life could be like in the days, weeks or months after one than 20 years from now.
So in the world you live in, where ever it is, Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't happen? Because those two nuclear attacks during the war showed perfectly fine what would happen and what are the results of nuclear war. Altough of course there was already wide-spread chaos and violence before beause it was already a war zone.
I've been to Hiroshima a couple years ago, i went to the nuclear museum they have and it gave me a pretty good idea about what would happen and how life was after the nuclear fallout. I don't have to imagine it anymore, just standing next to the Genbaku Dōmu gave me chills.
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znapper
8 years ago
Indeed, going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be a must-do for just about everyone. I was at both places in 2007.
Just to add:
People also tend to forget about all the nuclear power-plants that would be targeted in a full-scale 1984 thermonuclear war.
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl were worked on massively, with machines, technology and in the Soviets case; Unlimited manpower, to minimize(?) the disaster as much as possible. In both cases, they could spend resources from other parts of the country.
- Even today, my country must do something we call "feeding down" of meat from sheep and reindeer in certain areas that experienced fall-out from Chernobyl, because the meat contains too much radioactivity.
That is 30 years after Chernobyl -to the date- and over 2000km away from ground zero, think about that for a minute.
Imagine 100-200 or more facilities being nuked or damaged, waste spread across the globe and no one to limit the damage, in addition to multiple nuclear warhead strikes on industry (among them, Chemical industry), civilian and military targets.
- Do you think you can still pop down to 7/11 and get a bottle? Most water will kill you one way or another after such an event.
How would you rebuild something like a city when there are no machines to do the work?
When there is no fuel?
When the people who are supposed to do this work, are either dead, don't have protection, food or are too weak or have no will to perform the duties?
- While at the same time dying from various after-effects (radiation, typhoid, cholera etc).
Remember how long the twin towers smoldered and how long it took (with state of the art machinery, manpower and technology) to clean up everything?
What if New-York itself was set on fire, how long would it burn and how much nastiness would be pumped into the atmosphere?
- In a global nuclear war, depicted in 'Threads', just about every major city is hit.
Read the story about Chelyabinsk http://sometimes-interesting.com/2011/07/15/the-most-contaminated-place-on-earth-chelyabinsk-40/ , around there, the average life-expectancy today is 40(!) years.
How much offspring and knowledge would be passed on over time with such a low life-expectancy? Remember that people also got to eat, so the majority of time spent, would be to gather food, since...well...all food-producing facilities are long gone. The passing over of knowledge is secondary, at best.....and who the heck knows how computers and phones work anyway? We "get them at the store" and we charge them trough a hole in the wall, that's just about the average knowledge of these things. Will experts on agriculture survive to pass on their knowledge? (this is the core message in Threads).
The picture they paint on the environment 13 years after, is grim, but IMO (based on 1984 stockpiles), is probably conservative.
The worst part is that knowledge and craft is lost in this process, so the ones that do survive, will have very basic technologies and knowledge, it will more then likely be back to medieval times for a very long time. (in Threads they speculate if this is indeed the end of man, since we aren't able to survive very well in those conditions).
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