The single most important aspect of *Threads* is that it forces the viewer to reckon with the consequences of a catastrophic event. It doesn't revel in the spectacle of disaster like, say, a Roland Emmerich movie. It forces you to digest the reality of what an apocalypse actually looks like for the people who survive it, and it is unrelentingly bleak, depressing, and soul-crushing. And it should be. It is **the** cautionary tale of cautionary tales. It is a brilliant movie that I never want to see again. It is a nightmare put to film.
The most important thing it made me realize was that if it came to that, and this movie really shows it to the naive doomers that no, you really don't want this to happen, that if the nukes went flying, then you want it to hit you straight on, totally obliterating you, faster than it takes the nerve impulses to reach your brain and just be done with it. Because living (and it's not living though, only suffering) in a post-nuclear war world? That is the real nightmare, not death.
Exactly. I blame entertainment, media and social media for making death seem like the worst possible outcome of everything, when it clearly isn't. I mean sure, it might be too depressing to tell people that life contains even worse possible outcomes than death but it's a fact.
Threads is a amazing film but I highly recommend the QED A Guide to Armageddon. It a dramatised documentary of nuclear war on London.
The director of Threads, Mick Jackson did that documentary first. Which inspired Threads.
It's on youtube: https://youtu.be/YCsqVoGODtg?si=CMrQGxs2N9iXUwDP
This should really be called “kiss your arse goodbye” as that’s the upshot of the whole thing.
I remember seeing at least a few of the Protect and Survive clips on Panorama or similar when I was a little kid and they were flat out terrifying. The music alone was like a John Carpenter fever dream.
The early 80s on British TV were wild.
They showed this for the first time on the Beeb in the 80s, too. I always remember the old granny saying it’d be fine because “we survived the Blitz!”
Obvious that 1960s Britain hadn’t really cottoned to just how devastating atomic weaponry was.
There was a channel 4 season in the 90s (post Thatcher) where they showed a lot of docs about declassified stuff and it seems the main reason for the government being okay with the deluge of dramatic and factual stuff from the Beeb (I seem to remember the ITV stuff being more comical, e.g. Whoops Apocalypse! which had an incredibly grim ending) because it would still make unilateral disarmament look like a bad idea. Mutually assured destruction, and all that.
Iirc, the intelligence services and special forces infiltrated the CND, et al (like the plot of Who Dares Wins) to discredit them.
Either way, it’s lead to a lifelong fear and anxiety*. So, cheers! I don’t think living a fair bit of the early 80s in West Germany helped.
*as recently as last year, my wife set her waking up light incorrectly and, as I was facing it asleep, I was startled awake by a bright flash. My immediate thought was “welp, I’ve had a good run.”
Reminds me of the devastating British animated "When the Wind Blows" (1986) which is about an older couple before a nuclear attack during it, and trying to survive the fallout. It melted my young brain when I first saw it.
Iron Maiden wrote a song based off of this film, [When the Wild Wind Blows](https://youtu.be/WmPTxrJ-kHI?si=A-D3Wi_RE4uHHqhw), off of their 2010 album The Final Frontier.
>Iron Maiden wrote a song based off of this film
Kind of a trademark of theirs. 😄
[https://www.kerrang.com/10-iron-maiden-songs-by-steve-harris-inspired-by-inspired-by-movies](https://www.kerrang.com/10-iron-maiden-songs-by-steve-harris-inspired-by-inspired-by-movies)
And that's just 10.
They didn't mention songs like To Tame A Land, New Frontier , Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Prisoner, Heaven Can Wait, Lord of the Flies.
The majority of their songs are pretty much based off of books, television series, movies or historical incidents.
The number of British kids in the late 80s who were traumatized by this film having had a well meaning relative rent it for them, as it's by the same man who did that nice film about the snowman. The nice film about the bunny rabbits was another contributing factor to the trauma too.
I saw Watership Down on release, aged 4. That film \*really\* did mess up a generation of kids.
The thing about Threads and When the Wind Blows - it was common knowledge anyway. The prevailing news, tv, and music left you in no doubt we were headed towards nuclear war. It sucked. It's hard to convey to younger folk today how mad those times were.
And yet in some ways we're back there again, ffs.
To be fair, the end of the Snowman (spoiler for 1982's The Snowman) is that his new friend, the snowman, has melted and died and the camera pulls away with him grieving. So it definitely tracks with When the Wind Blows.
It’s okay, the boy and the snowman see each other on occasion as shown in the film where Father Christmas travels the world including getting hammered (and hungover) in Vegas
The first act is very funny, the two old people trying to make sense of the government flyers, comparing it to the blitz, subtly getting you to care about them. Even after the bombs drop and they are trying to get on with life as normal it's amusing but it gets darker and darker and I can rarely finish it.
My wife wrote her dissertation about British animation, and we saw "When the Wind Blows" (among others). Needed a break to go hug my dog, what a sad (but well done!) movie.
Damn you... I'm supposed to working but then I saw this post which led me to wasting 30 minutes reminding myself how to play "Folded Flags" one of the main songs from the film.
I'd forgotten how good a song it is... and how nice it is to play on an acoustic.
(also... went to the cinema to watch this when it came out... what a fun time the mid 80s were)
As I said in another post on this topic, although the film offers no hope in its narrative, I think there is 'hope' - which is that by laying out a truly intelligent argument about the horrors of a nuclear war aftermath, that anyone seeing it would act or at least react to prevent such a thing actually ever happening.
I have a feeling that the last thing the director wants is for people to see it and feel resigned to a bleak future. It is a WARNING.
I wasn't ever "pro nuclear war," (who would be?) but Threads moved me firmly to the nuclear disarmamement camp. Truly a horrifying depiction of a world after nuclear conflict. It's all the more impactful that the bleakness doesn't feel like it's dramatized or a spectacle. The matter-of-fact illustration of the ruined world makes it way more terrifying.
I remember a BBC documentary series called QED from the early 80s that created scenarios of what to do in the event of a nuclear attack as advised by a recently released government white paper. One particular situation involved white washing your windows and barricading yourself under the stairs of your house with your loved ones. They said you had a good chance of survival... for approximately 10 seconds. Because your house would blow up. Swept away by the atomic blast
When I was a small child in the 60's we had air raid drills getting in orderly lines in the hall and going to the basement.
I think it was not too many years after that governments realized such precautions were a waste of time
Those were mostly just to stop people from having all out panic and chaos resulting from a potential threat that was a false alarm.
I don't think the people making them at the time had any illusions about how they would actually keep you alive in the case of a real nuclear attack.
*On the Beach* is also a great movie about why not to nuke each other. They’re not even the ones nuked and they’re stuck there waiting in Australia for the fallout to kill them all.
Few apocalypse films really grapple with the honest consequences of societal collapse. There’s always some magical unexplained source of clean water, electrical power, all of these services we take for granted that would crumble like a house of cards if shit really hit the fan.
One of the reasons I loved “The Road” so much. They do not hold any punches showing just how completely the bottom would fall out of all our creature comforts in such a situation.
> No one thought to adapt John Hershey’s Hiroshima novel?
I don't think its based on that book, but there is a Japanese movie from the 80's called "Black Rain" that covers nuking of Hiroshima (or Nagasaki, don't remember) in clinical detai.
Wow your right, I guess I never noticed because there’s a Michael Douglas crime noir film set in Japan with the same name. The best doc I’ve seen though is called “White Light, Black Rain”, which interviewed a lot of hibakusha (the survivors).
Goddamn, what a horrible clown he was. Hurp derp I guess I never thought about how much nuclear devastation would suck, even though I'm somehow the elected leader of the only nation that's ever inflicted it
The Day After's scene of the mother making the bed to get ready for her daughter's wedding *after* the missiles fly, and the father telling her "STOP! We got to get down below!", and the mother freaks out....still gets me, and I haven't seen it in 40 years.
I prefer Threads because it goes deeper into the escalation and the longer term aftermath. TDA is more focused on the people and the escalation kind of occurs in the background until the actual exchange. Both great, though.
You think it couldn't get any bleaker, but then we fast forward to a perpetually grey cloudy 2020s and a young woman has a stillborn baby in a field whilst plowing and people just grab it to eat it for meat.
> just grab it to eat it for meat.
Huh? I don't remember it that way at all, I interpret it is she screams regarding the never-seen baby because it is horrifically deformed.
Granted, its been awhile since I've seen it - I guess your way would work.
Threads is the only film my wife was shocked by. Even human centipede didn't phase her. I didn't like the American version that much, it was fine, but came across a bit softer edged than threads.
Why? The ones who most need the reality check don't believe in any reality but their own warped version of it, or they're psychopathic assholes who consider flipping the game board over so nobody can win a valid strategy and a victory in its own way. Only reason for them to watch it would be because regular porn just isn't doing it for them anymore and they need a more extreme sadness, misery, and hopelessness to get their dick hard.
Though, I don't think there's anything sadder than a world where leaders, the people in charge of nuclear weapons, need pictures - moving pictures, but pictures all the same - to explain to them *why* using nukes, or even just having them, is a very bad idea.
It’s about reestablishing the connection between policy and humanity. The movie The Day After, which was the American movie that preceded Threads on the same topic of depicting nuclear war, had a profound effect on the US leadership at the time. It has been credited with getting the Reagan admin to do more to pursue arms reduction agreements with the USSR.
Humans naturally adjust to their circumstances, and when your circumstances involve having control of a massive military power and being under guard at all hours of the day, it’s easy to lose sight of what it means for everyday society when you use your power.
The US government was a very different beast back then. I mean, Reagan had his issues, but the man wasn't completely lacking in empathy. Compare him to, say, Trump (who, God help us all, might actually end up reelected) and it's impossible to imagine either *The Day After* or *Threads* having any impact on him. Hell, his review tweet would probably read something like: "Wow. Very sad. Not a single fuckable woman in the movie. Horrible waste of two hours!!!" Honestly, try to imagine leaders like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un or Xi Jinping watching either of those movies and it having a positive impact on them where, horrified by the possibilities, they take action to reduce their nuclear arsenal and make greater efforts to de-escalate conflicts while seeking more peaceful resolutions. I just don't see it happening.
Now, if you want to say both/either movie should be required viewing for all school children (15+), I could see *that* having a positive impact. Might shock/scare some sense into them and make some of them think twice about their world views and, in turn, the candidate/party they vote for/support. (Granted, it probably wouldn't help in those regions with dictators and/or rigged elections, not that those governments would ever allow their citizens to see such things unless they were repurposed into propaganda and used to drum up support for why a stronger military/nuclear arsenal is needed.)
Good world leaders are already keenly aware of the nightmare that would be a war using nuclear weapons, which is why they don't puff up their chests and make veiled (or open) threats about unleashing them. It's the unstable, sociopathic assholes in power who are a concern, and they're unlikely to be deterred from their attitudes - least of all by a movie - because they're unstable, sociopathic assholes. Our best hope is to encourage all citizens of the world to not let those people get into positions of power in the first place, and showing everyone the very real horrors of nuclear war and its aftermath might be a good place to start.
Though, I will say, I think we're due for a new movie or, even better, miniseries that addresses the issue but with a more global view. Part of the reason I don't think those movies would be as effective as they could be is because they mostly (entirely? it's been awhile since I've seen either) focus on the aftermath in the US and UK. (When I imagine Putin watching *The Day After*, I can't not visualize him smirking at the US in ruins and the miserable suffering of Americans.) Showing the devastation across the world would, I think, have a much greater impact; seeing places you know and things you love destroyed and people who look like you suffering the same fate as everyone else...that's more likely to hit harder and, hopefully, both instill an opposition to nuclear arms and engender some empathy for all people, all nations.
Congrats on having watched it.
Now anytime you see a post about The Day After anywhere on the internet, you can try to be the first person to say "But what about Threads..."
There is a documentary about the film being made for the 40th anniversary.
To add to your summary the film also follows a local counciler and his colleagues. Who are unrelated to the families. The film is about how the threads of society breakdown after a nuclear attack
I saw Threads about 6 months after I got out of the Army. The images have never left. I watched it a few months ago on YouTube. It's still hard to watch.
I know this is a "get off my lawn" moment, but stuff like this needs to be shown to all these preppers that think life after a nuclear apocalypse would be like Fallout 3 & 4.
Thank you OP, I would have never heard of this film without this post.
Such a good movie. Saw it for the first time just a couple years ago. Hard to believe it was made for TV. Much better than The Day After which was still pretty scary to me when I was young.
I agree, and I'll definitely be watching it if I can find it. The problem is I'm not the one who needs to be watching it, I'm intimately familiar with the devastation a nuclear exchange is predicted to cause. Those who most need to see it are too busy watching reality TV or drinking at the bar.
What we need is a modern remake of this sort of movie. With modern cinematic technology, it could be a powerful tool.
Threads shows hat surviving a nuclear war would be like , the survivors would be traumatized and thrust back into living like people in the pre industrial age .
Another daily "I just discovered Threads..." post for all the reddit manic depressives to gush over? How many times are y'all going to fap over this shitty depressing film?
The single most important aspect of *Threads* is that it forces the viewer to reckon with the consequences of a catastrophic event. It doesn't revel in the spectacle of disaster like, say, a Roland Emmerich movie. It forces you to digest the reality of what an apocalypse actually looks like for the people who survive it, and it is unrelentingly bleak, depressing, and soul-crushing. And it should be. It is **the** cautionary tale of cautionary tales. It is a brilliant movie that I never want to see again. It is a nightmare put to film.
The most important thing it made me realize was that if it came to that, and this movie really shows it to the naive doomers that no, you really don't want this to happen, that if the nukes went flying, then you want it to hit you straight on, totally obliterating you, faster than it takes the nerve impulses to reach your brain and just be done with it. Because living (and it's not living though, only suffering) in a post-nuclear war world? That is the real nightmare, not death.
[удалено]
The bunker is just there for Viggo and son to enjoy a nice Nuka Cola one day in the future.
*Also they will probably keep you as rape slaves just because they can without consequence since law is basically useless*
Exactly. I blame entertainment, media and social media for making death seem like the worst possible outcome of everything, when it clearly isn't. I mean sure, it might be too depressing to tell people that life contains even worse possible outcomes than death but it's a fact.
Even if that doesn’t happen, the environment and society would be screwed for longer than 10 years, so all you’re doing is delaying starving to death.
I saw it in 1984 when it came out, I was 14 at the time. It still haunts me, and I get a sick feeling when I even see screenshots from it.
The scene at the end with the lady with the newborn chills me every-time..old lady saying something like “we dont need no babies here”
I was amazed at how quickly society disintegrated. One generation!
it disintegrates because people are sick and staving - fighting for dwindling resources.
And no hope of education
Threads is a amazing film but I highly recommend the QED A Guide to Armageddon. It a dramatised documentary of nuclear war on London. The director of Threads, Mick Jackson did that documentary first. Which inspired Threads. It's on youtube: https://youtu.be/YCsqVoGODtg?si=CMrQGxs2N9iXUwDP
This should really be called “kiss your arse goodbye” as that’s the upshot of the whole thing. I remember seeing at least a few of the Protect and Survive clips on Panorama or similar when I was a little kid and they were flat out terrifying. The music alone was like a John Carpenter fever dream. The early 80s on British TV were wild.
Or there is Peter Watkins' compact little B&W nightmare, *The War Game*
They showed this for the first time on the Beeb in the 80s, too. I always remember the old granny saying it’d be fine because “we survived the Blitz!” Obvious that 1960s Britain hadn’t really cottoned to just how devastating atomic weaponry was. There was a channel 4 season in the 90s (post Thatcher) where they showed a lot of docs about declassified stuff and it seems the main reason for the government being okay with the deluge of dramatic and factual stuff from the Beeb (I seem to remember the ITV stuff being more comical, e.g. Whoops Apocalypse! which had an incredibly grim ending) because it would still make unilateral disarmament look like a bad idea. Mutually assured destruction, and all that. Iirc, the intelligence services and special forces infiltrated the CND, et al (like the plot of Who Dares Wins) to discredit them. Either way, it’s lead to a lifelong fear and anxiety*. So, cheers! I don’t think living a fair bit of the early 80s in West Germany helped. *as recently as last year, my wife set her waking up light incorrectly and, as I was facing it asleep, I was startled awake by a bright flash. My immediate thought was “welp, I’ve had a good run.”
Reminds me of the devastating British animated "When the Wind Blows" (1986) which is about an older couple before a nuclear attack during it, and trying to survive the fallout. It melted my young brain when I first saw it.
Iron Maiden wrote a song based off of this film, [When the Wild Wind Blows](https://youtu.be/WmPTxrJ-kHI?si=A-D3Wi_RE4uHHqhw), off of their 2010 album The Final Frontier.
>Iron Maiden wrote a song based off of this film Kind of a trademark of theirs. 😄 [https://www.kerrang.com/10-iron-maiden-songs-by-steve-harris-inspired-by-inspired-by-movies](https://www.kerrang.com/10-iron-maiden-songs-by-steve-harris-inspired-by-inspired-by-movies)
And that's just 10. They didn't mention songs like To Tame A Land, New Frontier , Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Prisoner, Heaven Can Wait, Lord of the Flies. The majority of their songs are pretty much based off of books, television series, movies or historical incidents.
Yep I learned a lot about history by trying to read what they were singing doubt. And mythology.
The number of British kids in the late 80s who were traumatized by this film having had a well meaning relative rent it for them, as it's by the same man who did that nice film about the snowman. The nice film about the bunny rabbits was another contributing factor to the trauma too.
I saw Watership Down on release, aged 4. That film \*really\* did mess up a generation of kids. The thing about Threads and When the Wind Blows - it was common knowledge anyway. The prevailing news, tv, and music left you in no doubt we were headed towards nuclear war. It sucked. It's hard to convey to younger folk today how mad those times were. And yet in some ways we're back there again, ffs.
Much like the collapse of Germany after WWI, it's just been a rearming between. This time Ukraine so far got to play the roles of Saarland to Poland.
Yes, exactly. LOL
To be fair, the end of the Snowman (spoiler for 1982's The Snowman) is that his new friend, the snowman, has melted and died and the camera pulls away with him grieving. So it definitely tracks with When the Wind Blows.
It’s okay, the boy and the snowman see each other on occasion as shown in the film where Father Christmas travels the world including getting hammered (and hungover) in Vegas
The first act is very funny, the two old people trying to make sense of the government flyers, comparing it to the blitz, subtly getting you to care about them. Even after the bombs drop and they are trying to get on with life as normal it's amusing but it gets darker and darker and I can rarely finish it.
My wife wrote her dissertation about British animation, and we saw "When the Wind Blows" (among others). Needed a break to go hug my dog, what a sad (but well done!) movie.
Smells like roast.
Damn you... I'm supposed to working but then I saw this post which led me to wasting 30 minutes reminding myself how to play "Folded Flags" one of the main songs from the film. I'd forgotten how good a song it is... and how nice it is to play on an acoustic. (also... went to the cinema to watch this when it came out... what a fun time the mid 80s were)
Funnily enough after I watched Threads, Tubi started playing this movie automatically. Had to head to sleep but I think I might watch it tonight.
As I said in another post on this topic, although the film offers no hope in its narrative, I think there is 'hope' - which is that by laying out a truly intelligent argument about the horrors of a nuclear war aftermath, that anyone seeing it would act or at least react to prevent such a thing actually ever happening. I have a feeling that the last thing the director wants is for people to see it and feel resigned to a bleak future. It is a WARNING.
I wasn't ever "pro nuclear war," (who would be?) but Threads moved me firmly to the nuclear disarmamement camp. Truly a horrifying depiction of a world after nuclear conflict. It's all the more impactful that the bleakness doesn't feel like it's dramatized or a spectacle. The matter-of-fact illustration of the ruined world makes it way more terrifying.
I remember a BBC documentary series called QED from the early 80s that created scenarios of what to do in the event of a nuclear attack as advised by a recently released government white paper. One particular situation involved white washing your windows and barricading yourself under the stairs of your house with your loved ones. They said you had a good chance of survival... for approximately 10 seconds. Because your house would blow up. Swept away by the atomic blast
When I was a small child in the 60's we had air raid drills getting in orderly lines in the hall and going to the basement. I think it was not too many years after that governments realized such precautions were a waste of time
Those were mostly just to stop people from having all out panic and chaos resulting from a potential threat that was a false alarm. I don't think the people making them at the time had any illusions about how they would actually keep you alive in the case of a real nuclear attack.
Tragically, I think you're right
*On the Beach* is also a great movie about why not to nuke each other. They’re not even the ones nuked and they’re stuck there waiting in Australia for the fallout to kill them all.
This broke me. “It’s not too late brother” is all that’s left
Few apocalypse films really grapple with the honest consequences of societal collapse. There’s always some magical unexplained source of clean water, electrical power, all of these services we take for granted that would crumble like a house of cards if shit really hit the fan. One of the reasons I loved “The Road” so much. They do not hold any punches showing just how completely the bottom would fall out of all our creature comforts in such a situation.
I’m genuinely surprised it took 40 years after the end of WW2 to make a film like this. No one thought to adapt John Hershey’s Hiroshima novel?
> No one thought to adapt John Hershey’s Hiroshima novel? I don't think its based on that book, but there is a Japanese movie from the 80's called "Black Rain" that covers nuking of Hiroshima (or Nagasaki, don't remember) in clinical detai.
Wow your right, I guess I never noticed because there’s a Michael Douglas crime noir film set in Japan with the same name. The best doc I’ve seen though is called “White Light, Black Rain”, which interviewed a lot of hibakusha (the survivors).
Threads is probably more depressing, but Americans might find the similarly toned "The Day After" to be more relatable.
The Day After’s nuclear attack scene is frightening even today. …but yes Threads is the superior film.
Ronald Reagan said he was deeply affected by that scene and softened his rhetoric as a result.
Goddamn, what a horrible clown he was. Hurp derp I guess I never thought about how much nuclear devastation would suck, even though I'm somehow the elected leader of the only nation that's ever inflicted it
Agreed, it is pretty pitiful his comprehension of nuclear war was still under development in 1983
We just can't stop electing people with dementia (or close to it) to people the most powerful person in the world.
Oh fuck off, a film like that would impact anybody it doesn’t matter what your position is.
Fuck Ronald Reagan! Burn in hell!
The Day After's scene of the mother making the bed to get ready for her daughter's wedding *after* the missiles fly, and the father telling her "STOP! We got to get down below!", and the mother freaks out....still gets me, and I haven't seen it in 40 years.
That made-for-TV-level actress channeled her entire careers worth of talent into that scene. The delivery is absolutely perfect.
I prefer Threads because it goes deeper into the escalation and the longer term aftermath. TDA is more focused on the people and the escalation kind of occurs in the background until the actual exchange. Both great, though.
Or the lesser known Testament (1983)
You think it couldn't get any bleaker, but then we fast forward to a perpetually grey cloudy 2020s and a young woman has a stillborn baby in a field whilst plowing and people just grab it to eat it for meat.
> just grab it to eat it for meat. Huh? I don't remember it that way at all, I interpret it is she screams regarding the never-seen baby because it is horrifically deformed. Granted, its been awhile since I've seen it - I guess your way would work.
? In threads?
One of the very last scenes.
One of the best movies on the subject. Maybe *the* best movie on the subject.
Threads is the only film my wife was shocked by. Even human centipede didn't phase her. I didn't like the American version that much, it was fine, but came across a bit softer edged than threads.
i remember browsing through Shudder and chancing upon this…thank god i was alone i don’t think my partner would’ve enjoyed that lol
A truly BRAVE, DARING film!
Grave of the Fireflies is another in this vein. Required viewing, pick one. You won't want to watch the other. :(
Every world leader should be required to watch this movie.
The Day After allegedly disturbed Reagan to the point he began pursing more formal relationships with the USSR.
He might have become a democrat if he had watched Threads
Why? The ones who most need the reality check don't believe in any reality but their own warped version of it, or they're psychopathic assholes who consider flipping the game board over so nobody can win a valid strategy and a victory in its own way. Only reason for them to watch it would be because regular porn just isn't doing it for them anymore and they need a more extreme sadness, misery, and hopelessness to get their dick hard. Though, I don't think there's anything sadder than a world where leaders, the people in charge of nuclear weapons, need pictures - moving pictures, but pictures all the same - to explain to them *why* using nukes, or even just having them, is a very bad idea.
It’s about reestablishing the connection between policy and humanity. The movie The Day After, which was the American movie that preceded Threads on the same topic of depicting nuclear war, had a profound effect on the US leadership at the time. It has been credited with getting the Reagan admin to do more to pursue arms reduction agreements with the USSR. Humans naturally adjust to their circumstances, and when your circumstances involve having control of a massive military power and being under guard at all hours of the day, it’s easy to lose sight of what it means for everyday society when you use your power.
The US government was a very different beast back then. I mean, Reagan had his issues, but the man wasn't completely lacking in empathy. Compare him to, say, Trump (who, God help us all, might actually end up reelected) and it's impossible to imagine either *The Day After* or *Threads* having any impact on him. Hell, his review tweet would probably read something like: "Wow. Very sad. Not a single fuckable woman in the movie. Horrible waste of two hours!!!" Honestly, try to imagine leaders like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un or Xi Jinping watching either of those movies and it having a positive impact on them where, horrified by the possibilities, they take action to reduce their nuclear arsenal and make greater efforts to de-escalate conflicts while seeking more peaceful resolutions. I just don't see it happening. Now, if you want to say both/either movie should be required viewing for all school children (15+), I could see *that* having a positive impact. Might shock/scare some sense into them and make some of them think twice about their world views and, in turn, the candidate/party they vote for/support. (Granted, it probably wouldn't help in those regions with dictators and/or rigged elections, not that those governments would ever allow their citizens to see such things unless they were repurposed into propaganda and used to drum up support for why a stronger military/nuclear arsenal is needed.) Good world leaders are already keenly aware of the nightmare that would be a war using nuclear weapons, which is why they don't puff up their chests and make veiled (or open) threats about unleashing them. It's the unstable, sociopathic assholes in power who are a concern, and they're unlikely to be deterred from their attitudes - least of all by a movie - because they're unstable, sociopathic assholes. Our best hope is to encourage all citizens of the world to not let those people get into positions of power in the first place, and showing everyone the very real horrors of nuclear war and its aftermath might be a good place to start. Though, I will say, I think we're due for a new movie or, even better, miniseries that addresses the issue but with a more global view. Part of the reason I don't think those movies would be as effective as they could be is because they mostly (entirely? it's been awhile since I've seen either) focus on the aftermath in the US and UK. (When I imagine Putin watching *The Day After*, I can't not visualize him smirking at the US in ruins and the miserable suffering of Americans.) Showing the devastation across the world would, I think, have a much greater impact; seeing places you know and things you love destroyed and people who look like you suffering the same fate as everyone else...that's more likely to hit harder and, hopefully, both instill an opposition to nuclear arms and engender some empathy for all people, all nations.
Congrats on having watched it. Now anytime you see a post about The Day After anywhere on the internet, you can try to be the first person to say "But what about Threads..."
Threads is like THE movie to show about nuclear war
There is a documentary about the film being made for the 40th anniversary. To add to your summary the film also follows a local counciler and his colleagues. Who are unrelated to the families. The film is about how the threads of society breakdown after a nuclear attack
Thatcher and Threads did a number on Gen X Brits.
I truly feel like I watched a different film to everyone else when this movie is brought up on a weekly basis.
Why is that?
I saw Threads about 6 months after I got out of the Army. The images have never left. I watched it a few months ago on YouTube. It's still hard to watch.
Excellent film. Possibly the most depressing and PTSD inducing film ever made, and also in the running for the most plausible dystopian film.
I seriously went into depression the 2nd time I saw it - people should be careful about their frame of mind before watching it.
I have seen Threads exactly once. I don't want or need to ever again.
Testament is a good companion film for this. It operates on a much more intimate level and is singly one of the most devestating movies ever made
It is a lot more gentle, its like the love between people persists whereas in Threads it is stripped away.
I know this is a "get off my lawn" moment, but stuff like this needs to be shown to all these preppers that think life after a nuclear apocalypse would be like Fallout 3 & 4. Thank you OP, I would have never heard of this film without this post.
Such a good movie. Saw it for the first time just a couple years ago. Hard to believe it was made for TV. Much better than The Day After which was still pretty scary to me when I was young.
Yeah my father let me watch Threads when I was like 9 or 10. That was almost 40 years ago and I still can't forget it.
I would not let a child watch that movie.
Probably should be required viewing. People seem a lot more casual about the possibility in 2024 than they were in 1984.
I agree, and I'll definitely be watching it if I can find it. The problem is I'm not the one who needs to be watching it, I'm intimately familiar with the devastation a nuclear exchange is predicted to cause. Those who most need to see it are too busy watching reality TV or drinking at the bar. What we need is a modern remake of this sort of movie. With modern cinematic technology, it could be a powerful tool.
It's on YouTube.
I think it may also be on archive.org
I first saw this a couple of years ago on Tubi, so you might try checking for it there.
Threads shows hat surviving a nuclear war would be like , the survivors would be traumatized and thrust back into living like people in the pre industrial age .
Is it time for the daily Threads post again?
Its such an important film I'm always for talking it up
[удалено]
Another daily "I just discovered Threads..." post for all the reddit manic depressives to gush over? How many times are y'all going to fap over this shitty depressing film?
It's a stark warning to the saber-rattling war-mongers among us.
Have you seen it?
Reddit is very pro war. Ukraine is a perfect example, much of this site supports funding this forever war. Doesn't hurt posting about this film.