Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2023 23:42:33 GMT
From ‘Oppenheimer’ to ‘Repo Man’: Truthdig’s Guide to Nuclear Cinema
Surveying eight decades of onscreen atomic anxiety.
www.truthdig.com/articles/from-oppenheimer-to-repo-man-truthdigs-guide-to-nuclear-cinema/
With its $100 million budget, Christopher Nolan’s all-star biopic “Oppenheimer” is the most expensive movie about nuclear weapons ever made. But spending lots of money is no guarantee of a film’s worth or impact, especially in the extensive catalog of films about the bomb and its shadow. The 1984 BBC film “Threads” was made on a budget of $600,000 and remains the reigning king of nuclear-themed realism and despair. On Nov. 20, 1983, more than 100 million Americans watched “The Day After,” a made-for-TV movie by a middling director that left President Ronald Reagan so emotionally shaken, he devoted his second administration to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons, to the point of discussing their abolition with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Nolan’s movie is unlikely to join those films in the nuclear pantheon. It may not even be the best biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, contending as it does with the overlooked seven-part 1980 PBS miniseries of the same name starring Sam Waterston. But the limits of the nuclear film in 2023 says as much about the culture as the relative merits of Nolan’s filmmaking. The public just isn’t nearly as focused, obsessed or terrified of nuclear weapons as it was in the 1960s and the 1980s, the genre’s two golden ages.
But it should be. The Doomsday clock maintained by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is currently set to 90 seconds to midnight. NATO and Russia are playing a game in Ukraine that has drawn informed comparisons to an extended Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear arms control has collapsed. New generations of nuclear weapons are being developed by the U.S., Russia and China. Wherever history ends up ranking the new “Oppenheimer,” it’s a very well-timed entry to a long movie tradition of reckoning with the bomb and its effects on human beings at every level, from the civilizational to the cellular.
With that in mind, here’s our guide to essential atomic movies.
Five (1951)
The film that laid down the Geiger-counting gauntlet for dozens of post-nuclear survivor-group stories. Director Arch Oboler made his name as a playwright and proto-Rod Serling with the 1930s NBC radio program, “Lights Out,” before transitioning to Hollywood during the war. He begins “Five” with a trope that would become cliché, but was fresh at the time: a mushroom cloud, howling winds, screams and scenes of total destruction. No backstory to the catastrophe is given, because once it occurs, what does it matter? A group of four men and one woman straggle their way to the California coast, where they realize there is little to do but ponder their predicament and wait to die.
Surveying eight decades of onscreen atomic anxiety.
www.truthdig.com/articles/from-oppenheimer-to-repo-man-truthdigs-guide-to-nuclear-cinema/
With its $100 million budget, Christopher Nolan’s all-star biopic “Oppenheimer” is the most expensive movie about nuclear weapons ever made. But spending lots of money is no guarantee of a film’s worth or impact, especially in the extensive catalog of films about the bomb and its shadow. The 1984 BBC film “Threads” was made on a budget of $600,000 and remains the reigning king of nuclear-themed realism and despair. On Nov. 20, 1983, more than 100 million Americans watched “The Day After,” a made-for-TV movie by a middling director that left President Ronald Reagan so emotionally shaken, he devoted his second administration to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons, to the point of discussing their abolition with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Nolan’s movie is unlikely to join those films in the nuclear pantheon. It may not even be the best biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, contending as it does with the overlooked seven-part 1980 PBS miniseries of the same name starring Sam Waterston. But the limits of the nuclear film in 2023 says as much about the culture as the relative merits of Nolan’s filmmaking. The public just isn’t nearly as focused, obsessed or terrified of nuclear weapons as it was in the 1960s and the 1980s, the genre’s two golden ages.
But it should be. The Doomsday clock maintained by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is currently set to 90 seconds to midnight. NATO and Russia are playing a game in Ukraine that has drawn informed comparisons to an extended Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear arms control has collapsed. New generations of nuclear weapons are being developed by the U.S., Russia and China. Wherever history ends up ranking the new “Oppenheimer,” it’s a very well-timed entry to a long movie tradition of reckoning with the bomb and its effects on human beings at every level, from the civilizational to the cellular.
With that in mind, here’s our guide to essential atomic movies.
Five (1951)
The film that laid down the Geiger-counting gauntlet for dozens of post-nuclear survivor-group stories. Director Arch Oboler made his name as a playwright and proto-Rod Serling with the 1930s NBC radio program, “Lights Out,” before transitioning to Hollywood during the war. He begins “Five” with a trope that would become cliché, but was fresh at the time: a mushroom cloud, howling winds, screams and scenes of total destruction. No backstory to the catastrophe is given, because once it occurs, what does it matter? A group of four men and one woman straggle their way to the California coast, where they realize there is little to do but ponder their predicament and wait to die.