We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"
-ALFRED HITCHCOCK
When I was in high school learning about the Cold War, there were whispers of a movie about the effects of nuclear war we were not allowed to watch. the rumor was, it was the most disturbing and nihilistic movie you could watch on the subject. I had no clue if this movie was real for the longest time, and it was only after digging into the famous short story "I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM'' that I had finally found the real movie after a 5 year search. and it was well worth the wait.
some movies in the horror genre end up fetishizing the apocalypse, and a lot of people have a sort of jokey hopefulness about the end of civilization. it's easy to feel that society is beyond the point of ever being fixed, and the best solution would be to start over from scratch. if you find yourself thinking maybe that is not such a bad idea, this movie is here to rain on your parade.
Hitchcock's bomb under the table suspense is on full display here, and it's made even more haunting by just how possible the outcome of this movie is and was. watching a family go through their daily life feels like you want to grab every character and tell them to get as far away from here as humanly possible. it's a setting and feeling that I have always found fascinating, and this movie does a great job of exploring that feeling subtly in its opening half-hour. even before the bomb, this movie never lets you get comfortable. in a word, this opening is dreadful.
the actual attack doesn't happen until the 48-minute mark, and this movie walks you through all of the smallest details. as for the destruction, it's as close to the biblical hell I can imagine. thousands of screams layered over each other, people burning alive in the streets, entire towns gone in minutes, children left to die, all of this followed by complete silence. it's a strange combo of a narrator explaining the logistics of what's happening, and watching the characters in this movie become pieces of the wreckage.
it is easy to feel disconnected from events that happened before you were born, and it's hard to get a sense of scale with something so massive as a nuclear bomb. in school, I often felt history was a hard subject to engage with, but movies like this capture the mood perfectly. this movie is exactly the nihilistic post war masterpiece i had always hoped it would be.
now if you will excuse me, I have to go re-read WATCHMEN.
10/10
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