The Day After - Starring Jason Robards
15/09/202080s movie about nuclear war
The bit that I remembered from this film, from seeing it years ago, was the cars stopping on the highway.
An Electro-magnetic pulse, preceding the nuclear explosions about to hit Kentucky, cripples all electrics including the car batteries. So there is an ominous moment where all those fleeing the city and the impending destruction find themselves stopped and not knowing what's going on. Before the flash of the big one...or big ten or however many bombs land.
Kentucky has been targeted as it is the site of a nuclear launching facility, so all these country folk, many of whom have thought 'why would anyone target us', are right in Russia's crosshairs. We see the missiles being fired from underground silos, amongst fields full of cows and horses as America makes a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack - nobody in the civilian population knows whether Russian missiles were already on their way.
It is relatively low-budget effects but the x-ray sihouettes of people before they are evaporated by the blast are quite jarring. And then the horror of broken down civilisation begins, as the film focuses on one university hospital trying to treat the injured as more and more people pour in. If they weren't injured by the blast, they are beginning to succumb to radiation poisoning. A slow and physical deterioration, bleeding from all orificies, sickness and then a slow painful death.
This film is comparable to Threads, which I prefer for the simple reason that Threads set in the UK, so the comfortable familiarity destroyed in that movie chimes closer to home.
Surely it couldn't happen..? But, just like the inevitability of a global pandemic, it is probably not if, but when.