Movies about World war three
Concerned about the genuine possibility of global thermonuclear war? Maybe if we could get the 45th President of the USA to sit down and watch the following films, he’d remove his small finger from the doomsday button
Feature by John Bleasdale | 02 May 2017
A new phantom stalks the land. Missile tests in North Korea are matched by submarines and aircraft carriers steaming full speed towards (or away from) the Korean peninsula. A face-off with a mad egotistical baby king with no conscience on one side and Kim Jong-un on the other. The threat of thermonuclear war is but a Twitter rant and a beautiful slice of chocolate cake away.
It’s been what historians term ‘yonks’ since this kind of madness was in the air. In the 80s, a nuclear conflict was a palpable fear, a nightmare that overshadowed our days and infected our fantasies. In 1984, the BBC’s Vlákna showed us what a nuclear bomb would do to Sheffield of all places and the vision of milk bottles melting on steps and Woolworths blowing up brought home the reality of nuclear destruction.
A year before ABC had screened Následujícího dne, which showed Jason Robards and Steve Guttenberg in the aftermath of an all-out attack on Kansas (essentially the American Sheffield). Meanwhile, Mad Max went Beyond the Thunderdome and Frankie Goes to Hollywood sang about two tribes going to war; the women of Greenham Common climbed the fences of American airbases and the CND staged protests where everyone would lie in the streets pretending to be dead, at once powerful and embarrassing at exactly the same time.
This cultural reaction wasn’t just the rehearsing of nightmarish fantasies, it was also a form of conscious political education. Následujícího dne was screened for Ronald Reagan a week prior to its transmission. Reagan was, reportedly, greatly depressed, later crediting the TV movie with changing his view on nuclear weapons and forever securing Steve Guttenberg’s place in history. Vlákna had a similar impact in Britain and inspired debate for weeks after.
In the last few decades, nuclear weapons have disappeared from our movies and our collective imagination. Our apocalypse is more likely to come from a virus or a climatic event than from warheads. The existential threat worrying filmmakers for the last decade has been the imminent zombie invasion. You could argue zombies are a metaphor, but we all know they’re just zombies. If there has been a mushroom cloud on screen in recent years, you can be assured Indiana Jones was safe and sound in a fridge close by.
But now, with Donald Trump’s tiny finger on the button, we need to get up to speed. We need to remember the horror, the nuclear winter, the fallout, the mega kills. If anyone in the White House is reading, these are the films you need to get the commander-in-chief to sit down and study.
Dr. Strangelove a Fail-Safe (1964)
1964 was a hell of a year for nuclear war. With the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis still fresh in everyone’s mind, Fail-Safe went into production but Stanley Kubrick managed to get the film bumped so doktore Strangelove, his comic take on a very similar narrative, would appear in theatres first, effectively dooming Sidney Lumet’s earnest adaptation at the box office.
In both films, a US bomber is mistakenly heading to drop a nuke on Russia. In Kubrick’s, General Jack D. Ripper’s Cold War paranoia blows up into full-scale madness. With Lumet, a technical glitch – one which an end title insists could never actually happen – has the same effect. Henry Fonda plays the President who must make an increasingly murderous series of decisions in order to avert an all-out nuclear conflict. Walter Matthau appears as the Kissinger/Strangelove-esque theorist who sees the accident as an opportunity to destroy Russia. It’s a non-comedic role (Dom DeLuise and Larry Hagman also have straight roles), and almost every scene is gripped with a solemnity Divná láska would fatally prick.
The telephone conversations between a squawking Russian Premier and Fonda are impossible to watch without imagining Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley saying, “I’m upset too Dimitri.” And yet, Lumet’s film retains an exhausted tension, and its humourless, musicless march to a shocking denouement is powerfully bleak. Kubrick’s doktore Strangelove, on the other hand, is a satirical masterpiece, with its brilliant monsters such as George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson – “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” Turgidson says, glibly referring to the millions of casualties that will result from his actions – all too recognisable even today.
WarGames (1983)
«Fail-Safe for the Pac-Man Generation” was how Leonard Maltin referred to WarGames. Directed by John Badham, the drama linked the first home computer craze with the height of the Cold War threat. About as ’80s as you can get without being called Weird Science, the film stars Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick as a young girl and her proto-hacker boyfriend who accidentally set off NORAD’s supercomputer on a World War III simulation that could see real missiles leaving the silos.
Although there’s a lot of fun to be had, with running and jumping, helicopters and the nostalgia of seeing people gasp at the idea of computers being connected via phone lines, the film keeps some of the darkness that saw the original director, Martin Brest, booted off the project. The opening scene sees West Wing’s John Spencer and an incredibly young Michael Madsen as the two soldiers who must turn the keys and launch the missiles. Ronald Reagan was actually a friend of co-screenwriter Lawrence Lasker and, on seeing the film, showed an increased interest in computer security.
Oběť (Offret) (1986)
Genius Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film is a kind of Swedish Král Lear set in World War III. Erland Josephson plays Alexander, a former actor and retired theatre critic and director who lives on a Swedish island with his family. He pontificates about the shallowness of modern man and his own alienation from God. But when WWIII breaks out, he is haunted by visions of total destruction and offers to sacrifice everything – including his family – if the nuclear war can somehow be averted.
Obviously, Alexander must sleep with the maid – who is rumoured to be a witch – in order to seal the deal. This being Tarkovsky, the tryst takes place hovering a few metres above the bed, and a slippery and well-hidden humour pervades the film. The liberating hopefulness of the finale posits a kind of holy madness against the genuine, everyday madness of mutually assured destruction.
Když fouká vítr (1986)
In the 80s, even cartoons and children’s books were affected by the impending mushroom cloud. Graphic novelist Raymond Briggs had reimagined Father Christmas sitting on the bog and a pre-Šrek Fungus the Bogeyman picking his nose and eating it, but his true masterpiece was a fable of an old couple, James and Hilda Bloggs. Když Vítr Fouká sees the Bloggs prepare for the arrival of the ICBMs armed only with a nostalgic spirit gleaned from WWII and a government pamphlet entitled Chránit a přežít.
Faithfully filmed in 1986 by Jimmy Murakami, John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft voiced the OAPs. Their optimism and later stoicism are wholly inadequate to the crisis and although they survive the immediate attack, radiation sickness soon sets in and their optimism begins to fail. A disproportionate number of nuclear war films concentrate on the angst of those in power, but Murakami’s animation is a moving portrait of ordinary people caught in the maelstrom and the suffering that would result.
Follow John Bleasdale on Twitter at @drjonty
Movies to watch for the impending World War 3
“The Russians need to take us in one piece, and that’s why they’re here. That’s why they won’t use nukes anymore; and we won’t either, not on our own soil. The whole damn thing’s pretty conventional now. Who knows? Maybe next week will be swords.” — RED DAWN (1984)
In case you haven’t been keeping up, there’s a lot going down in Europe, specifically on the Ukrainian border which is igniting the embers of a war so cold we’d long considered it dead.
So, what’s a man to do about the impending threat of World War III as Russia is poised to invade Ukraine at literally any moment, prompting NATO-aligned countries to inevitably respond? The only thing we can do. Watch movies, and wait for the big boom.
MOVIES TO WATCH FOR DOOMSDAY:
RED DAWN was released in 1984 as glorified propaganda during the radically intensifying 1980s which saw the Cold War escalating as geopolitical tensions mounted.
In this action-drama, Russia and their South American allies stage a multilateral invasion of the United States after an alternate (but plausible) timeline saw NATO disband and the Warsaw Pact countries expand, leaving the U.S. diplomatically isolated.
In Colorado, a group of high school teens band together as “The Wolverines” and wage war through fierce guerrilla fighting against the invading forces. This iconic smash-hit starred Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, and Powers Boothe and is equal parts bleak and engaging.
Similarly, the 2010 remake swaps Colorado for Washington and replaced the Russians / Cuban alliance with a more understandable North Korea / Russia invading force. The film wasn’t. good. but it wasn’t exactly bad either. Honestly, I need to rewatch it myself. The remake starred Chris Hemsworth (pre-THOR) as well as Josh Hutcherson, Josh Peck, Isabel Lucas, and Adrianne Palicki and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
WAR GAMES is another iconic 1980’s thriller. This time, an unknowing computer hacker (Matthew Broderick) accidentally stumbles upon an artificial intelligence-driven US Military supercomputer that begins to play the titular “war games”, inadvertently executing scenarios to attack the Soviet Union.
THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, the classic 2002 spy-thriller starring Ben Affleck as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and Morgan Freeman as CIA Director Bill Cabot placed the world on the edge of an impending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia as a crazed Neo-Nazi leader seeks to rebuild the Reich in the ashes of Europe following a complete nuclear holocaust.
For those seeking a more down-trodden and frankly devastating take on the horrors of World War III, the following films are just the thing:
THREADS is a war drama taking place in the aftermath of World War III. This made-for-TV movie from 1984 is soul-crushing and, probably, the darkest thing I’ve ever seen as it chronicles the daily life of the citizens in Sheffield, Northern England. In this film, the war broke out following a NATO / Warsaw conflict as well.
And, finally, ON THE BEACH.
ON THE BEACH is a 1959 drama starring Anthony Perkins, Ava Gardner, and Gregory Peck. The film takes place in 1964 after World War III has decimated the entire northern hemisphere, killing all life within it and wreaking complete havoc on the natural world. The film follows survivors in Melbourne who go searching for the last pocket of humanity by attempting to find a U.S. Navy submarine.
This is the big one, and boy is it completely awful. In a good way. The film was remade for Australian television in 2000 and elaborated more on the cause of the war itself, which the original never did. The remake clarifies that the war was between China and the U.S. after the former invaded Taiwan.
Well, there you have it. Did I miss any? Have you seen any of these? Are you ready for the end of times?
‘World War III’: Venice Review
With the urgency of a good thriller and the clarity of a fable, World War III is the gruelling but compelling tale of how one of life’s victims learns to imitate his oppressors. Largely unspooling on the set of a bad film being made about the Holocaust, Iranian Houman Seyedi’s sixth feature starts out as jet-black comedy before darkening still further into tragedy, a journey embodied in an absorbing and extraordinary central performance by Mohsen Tanabandeh as the film’s downtrodden hero.
World War III is compelling, events hurtling along so quickly that the inattentive viewer could get lost
Seyedi’s work has regularly won acclaim at home, and the premiere of World War III in Venice’s Orizzonti section, one of four Iranian films seeking honours at the festival, could be the prelude to further international exposure.
The carefully-worked script kicks off with a short but telling scene between Shakib (Tanabandeh, from Asghar Farhadi’s Hrdina), still on the material and emotional skids after losing his wife and child in an earthquake, and deaf sex worker, the trembling, wide-eyed Ladan (Mahsa Hejazi). Many of the film’s themes are beautifully encapsulated in a brief exchange between the pair, united in their victimhood, which suggests from the outset that we’re in safe directorial hands.
Shakib finds work as a builder on the hellishly muddy and grungy set of what looks like the worst Holocaust picture ever made, produced by Nosrati (Navid Nosrati). Effectively, Shakib is being asked to build a concentration camp. Drafted as an extra on the set along with many other impoverished illiterates, Shakib finds himself, amongst other humiliations, being driven into a gas chamber: the extras have not been warned about what’s happening, and panic breaks out.
Pulled right into this awful experience by Payman Shadmanfar’s camera, we are in dark territory indeed, the horrors of history being played out as consumer entertainment — though some will feel any parallels between film production and the Holocaust are surplus to requirements.
When the actor playing Hitler collapses (“He’s ruined the uniform,” one crew member complains), Shakib is chosen as his stand-in and is allowed to stay in the actor’s fake mansion, under instructions to receive no visitors. At which point Ladan turns up: her procurer Farshid (Morteza Khanjani) seemingly has terrible plans for her. Shakib, who not only loves Ladan and depends on her but who senses that she might be his redemption, agrees to hide her in the mansion.
Everything that comes later — and there’s a lot of it, some of it startling visually and emotionally — derives from this decision, a dangerous one in a society that appears to have no room for altruism.
Tanabandeh as Shakib is terrific: initially a hangdog, stony-faced silent comedian figure at the mercy of powers he can’t comprehend (the first shot following his transformation into Hitler is laugh-aloud funny), he later becomes authentically tragic, undergoing a deep transformation that’s both dramatically justified and psychologically credible. At the plot level, World War III is compelling, events hurtling along so quickly that the inattentive viewer could get lost: key elements are often revealed through fleeting moments of dialogue.
There are moments of implausibility — quite why Shakib would be drafted so quickly as the replacement Hitler, and also why the film crew would tolerate him as long as they do once things become increasingly awkward for all parties, is never addressed. Over the final thirty minutes, the chaos of what’s happening onscreen threatens to become a chaotic experience for the viewer as well. But World War III feels solid because of its iron grip on the emotional logic at work inside Shakib: elegantly and truthfully, the plan for revenge on the system that he devises originates from an idea planted in him by the system itself.
The film’s epigraph is from Mark Twain: “History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes”. This is proven multiple times in World War III, as Seyedi drops in Holocaust parallels beyond the construction of the film set: this is a picture whose conceptual map, if not its plot, has been worked out to the last detail. At the start, Shakib is selected, for example, on the basis of his fitness for work; Ladan’s hiding place echoes the Anne Frank story; and the film’s extras are treated purely as agents of production rather than as humans.
Times may change, Seyedi is telling us, but the ways in which power is exercised remain the same, and there’s always someone at the bottom of the pyramid who will refuse to be forgotten. In one of those fleeting moments of revelatory dialogue at which World War III excels, Shakib is asked by the director whether he knows who Hitler was: his answer is no. Anyone who doesn’t know who Hitler was, this disturbing film suggests, is capable of themselves becoming Hitler.
Production company: Houman Seyedi
International sales: Iranian Independents, info@iranianindependents.com
Producer: Houman Seyedi
Screenplay: Houman Seyedi, Arian Vazir Daftari, Azad Jafarian
Cinematography: Payman Shadmanfar
Production design: Mohesn Nasrolahi
Editing: Houman Seyedi
Music: Bamdad Afshar
Main cast: Mohsen Tanabandeh, Neda Jebreili, Mahsa Hejazi, Navid Nosrati, Morteza Khanjani
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