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45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly frightening film, February 15, 2006
Saw this on PBS in 1983 and was terrified. The sheer graphic nature of the visual imagery remains burned into my brain -- burned people, wrecked houses, the utter hopelessness.
One of the things I remember best about this film was the bunker where the officials tried to cope with the disaster. That resonates with me today, because I am on the Emergency Operations Committee of the City of Newark, New Jersey. On 9/11, my post was at the Emergency Operations Center, working with other agencies: municipal, county, state, and federal. I had to prepare press releases and statements from the city to inform our residents on what to do and not do.
So if the bomb drops, that's where I'll be. And if the bomb drops, I'll be with those same folks, running out of food, water, power, and patience, while the world ends around me.
The officials try to figure out how to feed starving residents, and one wonders if his family has escaped the blast. He never finds out. I went through that myself...my wife was in New York on September 11, and I told her to get out, but didn't know if she'd made it. It was a chilling five hours. But she got out.
Thinking that day about "Threads," I saw myself in the same position as those city workers, studying a map, wondering if their families had survived, never finding out, and gradually being overwhelmed by the sheer hopelessness of the situation.
I remain haunted by the scene where British troops, long after the civilian government has collapsed, now little more than a uniformed mob, sift through the darkened bunker, finding everyone dead -- presumably from lack of food or radiation, or just exhaustion. The troops are only interested in food, and they sweep by the bodies, uncaring. I saw myself as one of the corpses lying on a desk in that scenario.
The final part of the picture, with Ruth and her daughter scrabbling at the diseased ground to farm, wrapped in rags, under a permanently gray sky, also haunts me. Below are spoilers, but at this point, I don't think I'm giving up the name of Orson Welles's sled.
Civilization had completely collapsed. Ruth's daughter's generation was growing up in a dreadful mix of ignorance and horror...knowing nothing but rubble, radiation, and death. With society and our social systems gone, they had no education.
I was struck by the scene where Ruth's daughter and her pals sit around a TV set, which is playing a tape, shucking corn (I think), and the tape is saying, "Cat...this is a skeleton of a cat." The TV was probably powered by a local power plant or batteries or some such, but there was no teacher. The kids were not interested in the tape.
That was what passed for education in the postwar world. No more Dickens, no more Michelangelo, no more Fermat. No universities, no high schools, no teachers. Learning had ended. Somehow, that upset the most...the idea that nuclear war would not only destroy humanity, but lobotomize the survivors.
When Ruth dies, Ruth's daughter takes her mother's bird book from her dead hands, incomprehendingly, and leaves her there. Quite probably she's never seen a bird. Family structure had broken down as well. That also resonated with me, because I thought about how important families and family rituals are in our civilized world. But in that environment, they meant nothing.
Ruth's daughter then meets and gets raped by some young men. One of the upsetting parts of this interchange was that neither party could speak properly. They were not only illiterate, but incoherent in speech...."Wozzat? Gizzum!" replacing the English language.
That was proved at the very end, when Ruth's daughter, pregnant, goes to what's left of a hospital, asking for help in delivering her baby.Actually, she yells at matron, "Babby! Come! Babby! Come!" I was struck by the idea of a woman in England -- birthplace of the language -- unable to say, "I'm having a baby, can you help me?"
I was equally struck that the cold matron, obviously older and still in possession of the English language, said, "You'll have to do it yourself, dear." There are no supplies left. Everyone is on their own.
And when Ruth delivers her daughter, it's deformed and stillborn. That's the final coda...the future of humanity. There isn't one.
And I hope that such is not the fate of my own beloved little daughter...to end up like Ruth's daughter.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A frightening Doomsday scenario, January 21, 2007
Regrettably, "Threads" is presently unobtainable in the United States, and the only available DVDs are encoded for Europe. This is unfortunate, because "Threads" is one of the most plausible and realistic Nuclear Doomsday scenarios one is ever likely to find. This is a compelling story of what we all feared during the bad old days of the Cold War. A period of international tension and confrontation culminating in nuclear war and an unthinkable aftermath.
The film's realism is heightened by the use of actual British civil defense television clips which, in their dry pragmatism, convince the viewer that nuclear war is an all-too-real possibility.
What really distinguishes this piece, however, is its depiction of the aftermath of nuclear war. Human beings are reduced to a bare minimum standard of living in a harsh, agricultural existence in which survival is by no means assured. Society effectively ends, the ecosystems are hopelessly damaged, and the future, if there is one, is unspeakably bleak.
This is a powerful and depressing film, and its graphic depiction of the effects of nuclear war are not for the squeamish. I wish very much that this film would become available on DVD here in the States.
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30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
THE post-nuclear-war film., January 17, 2006
Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984)
It is probably not a coincidence that Richard Jackson (Tuesdays with Morrie)'s meditation on the aftereffects of nuclear war was the last major made-for-TV picture in the genre. This, especially in 1984, would be pretty hard to top. Definitely not a case of "seen one nuclear war movie, seen 'em all."
It is quite similar to others in some respects, though. The first half of the movie is spent building up an ensemble cast of your basic john q. publics for the viewers to get sentimental over. In general it works, because the faces (then, anyway) were less instantly recognizable to most than the casts of The Day After or Testament; they really could pass, for the most part, as your average everyday Briton rather than folks whose trailers cost more than your house. There isn't a main character to the film per se, but the events seem to focus more than most around Ruth (Karen Meagher, recently in Carrie's War and A Good Thief), whose main worries in life revolve around her boyfriend. You know, typical everyday stuff. And, of course, the news broadcasts in the backgrounds of most of the scenes increase in frenzy as the film progresses. First half, though, is Just Another Nuclear War Movie(TM).
Then (you can't really call this a spoiler) the bombs hit, and everything changes. It's this bit, and selected scenes afterwards, that make Threads such a memorable experience (and one that many still have nightmares about, even if they've never seen it after its first broadcast on BBC2 twenty years ago). To say that the images during and just after the war pushed the envelope of televised graphic violence would be understating the case by a country mile. Folks who don't go to R-rated movies because of the violence probably still haven't seen anything else of the likes of this to this day. It's still the outer boundaries of what one can get away with on television, mostly because no one hasn't even tried. The viewer is inundated with about ten minutes, give or take, of nonstop over-the-edge brutality. Jackson and scriptwriter Barry Hines (The Gamekeepr, A Kestrel for a Knave, et al.) obviously wanted to make sure you got the message. (One wonders how recently Steven Spielberg had seen this before he made Saving Private Ryan.)
But that's not the really hard part. Hold on to your seats, folks, because it gets worse.
The bombs dropping change the movie from an episode of Coronation Street into a faux documentary, complete with droning narrator (Waking Ned Devine's Paul Vaughn), charting humanity's fate in the months and years after the war. More disturbing than the outright violence is the chaos that reigns afterwards. A scene set in a makeshift surgery is quite literally painful to watch, while the establishment of martial law should do a fine job in inciting the viewer to a murderous rage. (In counterpoint, perhaps, to the amusing scenes of anti-nuclear protestors in the first half of the film; one wonders whether they were put there as part of the scenery, as a way to more blatantly convey the script's anti-war sentiment, or as a kick in the pants to the anti-nuke movement. Any of the three is quite possible. There is no ambivalence about the martial law officers at the beginning, though. They might as well be wearing pig masks.)
But the real twist of the knife comes only a few minutes before the end of the film, in the scene that stuck with me, albeit in revised form, since the first and only (until now) time I saw them film, twenty years ago. It's a perfectly calculated scene (to name it would provide too many spoilers regarding the second half of the film) ten years after the war, and it sets the film's tone of perfect despair; humanity, according to Jackson and Hines, will forever be humanity. None of this Day After-style pulling together in the face of crisis. It's a perfect ending to a film that's good in parts, bad in others, but worth watching if you've never seen it. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the anti-war sentiment here is overkill, but Jackson and Hines do overkill in the right way; they still let the images tell the story, however hyperbolic that story may be.
Not for the weak of stomach, even less for the weak of mind. ***
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