Calling a film about nuclear war âbestâ seems odd, because this is a sobering topic. Many of these films and documentaries are quite entertaining, while others are so bleak and horrifying that one viewing is enough. I hate nuclear weapons and wish I could wave my magic Harry Potter wand and make them all disappear, forever.
This list concerns movies, movie-length documentaries, and films that dealt with the immediate consequencesâor pending eventsâof nuclear war. Therefore, I donât include such post-nuclear holocaust movies as Nausica or The Planet of the Apes. It was also hard to narrow it down to even 15, so T2, Akira, Wargames and several others didnât quite make the cut. Also, please note that this list is about TV and theatrical movies (with one exception), so please, no cries of âWhat about Jericho??â
May the days depicted in these films never come (again).
A virtually unknown and unsung movie, Miracle Mile stars Anthony Edwards as a young man who receives a panicked phone call that warns him WWIII is less than an hour away. He spends the rest of the movie trying to find the love of his lifeâwhom he recently metâbefore the end comes. Some parts are just plain silly, and parts of the movie scream 1980s schlock, but the build-up works well. The clip is the trailer.
This animated picture shows an elderly English couple slowly dying of radiation poisoning following a nuclear war. In the clip, the couple â a product of an earlier age â donât fully understand the extent of the devastation that they initially survived.
This 1986 John Kessel play was made into a 1-hour show as part of the short-lived Masters of Science Fiction program. Sam Waterston plays the president, who has lost all memory of the day the world diedâor did he? (One of the finest roles Waterston has played.) The clip looks like a promo for the program.
Sure itâs satire, and the picture of Slim Pickins riding a nuke like a bronco is ridiculous â but thatâs the point. The clip is that famous scene.
This sober Japanese movie shows how the atomic attack on Hiroshima affected one fictional family. (This is the only movie on the list I havenât seen yet, but it is highly praised and won/was nominated for several awards. I may move it up after viewing.) The clip is from the Siskel and Ebert review. (I miss Gene Siskel.)
What would happen if the president and much of the government were gone and an unstable man in the chain of succession decided that the only response to a mistaken nuclear attack was to win WWIII? The clip is the last 10 minutes, so donât view it if you want to see the whole film.
An American bomber squadron receives mistaken orders to bomb the Soviet Union, and all âfail-safeâ methods to turn the back arenât successful. George Clooney directed and starred in a terrific live broadcast version of the original movie. The clip is from the DVD release.
Although the science is more suspect, I like the original Gregory Peck version better than the updated Armand Assante version. In both, nuclear war has devastated the northern hemisphere, and the fallout cloud is heading to a doomed Australia. An American nuclear submarine tries to find survivors. The clip is a rather silly trailer for such a grim subject.
This documentary, narrated by William Shatner, traces the development of nuclear weapons from the very first in 1945 through the first Chinese test in 1964. Most of the major test explosions are shown. The clip shows several test explosions set to the music of William Stromberg, which gives a hauntingly beautiful veneer overlaying the true horror beneath.
A Californian small-town family survives a nuclear exchange, only to experience the decay of everything that once was. Their desperate attempts to return things to normal of course fail miserably. The clip is from a movie review from 1983. It starts about 1.35 into the clip.
This HBO documentary features interviews with survivors of the attacks as well as a few Americans who were in/with the bomber crews. Would that in another 60 years, we wonât be making another documentary with survivors from another nuclear attack! The clip is the trailer.
This BBC documentary uses CGI and more to recreate the attack. Very hard to watch. Even Malcolm McDowellâs notation is chilling. The brief clip is of the black rain that fell on the devastated city, which was horribly lethal to the parched survivors.
Though not as strong as the previous films (and definitely weaker than the next two), The Day After is high on this list because of its impact. The horror portrayed is tame compared to things that make their way on TV and in the theaters today, but this film remains an important cultural milestone. When it was first on, my Dad sent me to bed just after the nuclear attack, and I never saw the rest until 2 decades later. The clip is the attack scene.
This superb Japanese animated film follows a family in 1945 Hiroshima. The tension of the buildup to the bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, is chilling and incredibly done. The attack itself is slowed-down to show gruesome details as only anime can do. Horrifyingly unforgettable. (Think Grave of the Fireflies for emotional impact.) The clip is the attack scene.
This is the bleakest and most depressing movie ever made (outside of, perhaps, Grave of the Fireflies). The BBC made this TV movie that depicts Sheffield, England, just before, during, and well after the nuclear war. There is absolutely no hope or happiness in this movie whatsoever. All is destruction, death, and terrible decline of what remains. The clip is the attack scene.
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Contributor: STL Mo
good list
I don’t like nuclear war movies. I’ve only seen two of these (Dr Strangelove and the Day After) but I didn’t really like either.
havent seen any of these films!! Cant see much going on a movie after the nuke goes off :S
Depressed now. Boo! ;(
I didn’t mention that I’d seen exactly none of the substance abuse movies. I now mention it and add that I’ve never seen any of these nuclear war movies, either. Obviously substance abuse and nuclear war are not on my list of things to see before I die.
I saw Threads and The Day After when I was a neurotic gothic moody teenager and these films DID NOT HELP!!! I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a good film about nuclear war and I avoided any films on the topic after that. They all suck. Having said that, this is one list that doesn’t inspire me to seek out any of the films .
Just another list of films for me to download
Cheers
And I thought I got angsty as soon as December hit. Depressing list
ligeia: how could you not love Dr Strangelove? It is hilarious!
pyderz: you would be surprised
astraya: if you only see one film from those two lists, see “the day after” from this one – it is a fantastic film.
I loved Miracle Mile – but no one else I know ever heard of it!
Threads haunted me for years after I saw it on television. I assumed it was a series at first but it just got bleaker… and bleaker…
Didn the little girls in Grave of the Fireflies die from radiation?
jfrater: maybe I’m getting it confused with something else, to be honest I can’t really remember it very well. I guess that’s what happens when you watch too many films and smoke too much dope.
Hey, erm i’m not exactly the biggest terminator fanboy but i was pritty disapointed to that none of the Terminators were included to this list. I mean the first two Terminators were two of the greatest films of the 90′s and they both focus in on the ultimate inevitable nuclear holocaust.
I have only seen a few of these but I agree about Threads. If this is the future after a nuclear war, then I hope I am sitting under ground zero and get it over with right away.
Trinity and Beyond is one of my favorite documentaries. It dares to express that there is something hauntingly beautiful about atomic explosions.
BTW Ava Gardner starred in “On the Beach” and later said that Melbourne was the perfect place to make a movie about the end of the world.
astraya – Whilst I don’t have her exact words to hand, in his autobiography the well-known Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes (author, Time magazine staff writer etc) quoted Gardner as saying : “If they wanted to make a movie about the ends of the earth, they sure chose the right *****ing place…”
Enamoured, she obviously was not.
Is there any place that sells Threads that will play on a North American DVD player? So far I’ve only found UK and AUS/NZ format.
Uh, Nineteenth!
I was forced to watch “On the Beach” while working at a Cold War Museum. It was sad, but should have ended about a half hour before it did- it dragged on way too much.
From the infallible-pedia:
“It has often been claimed that Ava Gardner described Melbourne as ‘the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world’. However, the purported quote was actually invented by journalist Neil Jillett, who was writing for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time. His original draft of a tongue-in-cheek piece about the making of the film said that he had not been able to confirm a third-party report that Ava Gardner had made this remark. The newspaper’s sub-editor changed it to read as a direct quotation from Gardner, and it was published in that form. It entered Melbourne folklore very quickly.” and the rest of Australia, too!
I’m not sure Black Rain really belongs on this list. The Nuclear War is a very small back story. Otherwise I like the choices.
I wonder if “White Light / Black Rain had interviews with any Australians?
One of our neighbours – he passed away about 3 years ago, now was an Australian P.O.W. held in a camp in mainland Japan in the hills behind Hiroshima. On August 6th, 1945 he and all other P.O.W’s were driven into the city at bayonet-point to assisit with the ‘clean-up & rescue’ work post-attack.
His experiences in the city over the next two weeks or so (until the surrender after which they were finally released) drove him to become, at first reclusive and then into overt alcoholism. He eventually “straightened out” – after some years and helped form one of Australia’s (and I believe Melbourne’s first) Alcoholics Anonymous during the late 40′s/early 50′s and remained sober until his passing in 2006.
He occasionally talked about it with me and described the sound of the bomb, the wave of heat and the terrible wind which hit the hills but he would only, rarely mention some of the sights he witnessed on those devastated streets.
One of his admissions to me was – “When I was fighting in the army and a P.O.W., I hated the Japs – not so much the people, but their inhumane military. But after Hiroishima, all I could think about for years was – those poor bastards; how could humans do this to other humans?” He wasn’t blaming the A mericans; he was laming warfare in general and the lengths we will go to succeed at all costs.
Mick died of cancer born of his days in those ‘clean-up crews’ – all his mates from those crews are now dead as well – from the same cancer. Mick was the last
I miss ‘Mick’ – he was a true gentleman with never a bad word about anyone – not even the Japanese!
Wonderful list Stl-Mo – very moving. As you mentioned in your intro to the list and I heartily endorse: “May the days depicted in these films never come (again).”
Amen and Amen
JFrater, I thought you weren’t going to make anymore movie lists? Also, I haven’t seen any of these.
T-1000 – please read the intro.
Barabas – the little girl in Firelies died of starvation. (I had to check, though, when making the list. It had been a while since I had that movie, so I watched it just to make sure; if it had been radiation, then Fireflies would have been an automatic #1.)
All, yes, it is a very depressing list. But I felt compelled to put it together when I stumbled upon The Day AFter clip on You Tube while looking for The Day After Tomorrow. One thing led to another.
Besides, even though the Cold War is over, sadly the threat of nuclear holocaust remains. Makes me want to hug my family all the tighter.
Thanks, Jamie, for putting this up.
Muttley – Wow! Thanks for sharing Mick’s story!
A good list. I haven’t seen some of these movies but will try to now. But I don’t see how you can add a movie to this list you haven’t even seen. Sounds like you’re relying on other peoples opinion.
.9 jfrater
astraya: if you only see one film from those two lists, see âthe day afterâ from this one – it is a fantastic film.
I disagree. See all the movies you can and draw your own conclusion. Sometimes the best movies to show human carnage are more subtle, on a much smaller scale and without all the special effects.
The Day After was all hype. I watched it when it was first on and then watched it again many years later and it didn’t get any better.
i remember watchin number 14 in school
I am sitting in South Korea (about 50 km from the border), which (if North Korea has developed nuclear weapons) is on a list of possible targets. There is strong theory that states that if the north does have and use (a) nuclear weapon(s), then the target will be Japan, not the south. Japan has been the enemy since at least the 16th century, and particularly during the period 1910-1945, about which feelings still run high.
people really melt that way after nuclear bomb radiation? (as in the hadashi ni gen/n0.2)?
great list, I am fond of watching movies of this kind. I will take time to have these to watch. \
Thanks for the list.
“When the Wind Blows” has some wonderful music in it by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
I saw it just for that and found the story to be sad and touching.
My top choice for this list would be “The War Game” produced by Peter Watkins in 1965. It’s a pseudo documentary in gritty British B&W style, and I think presents the post-war environment in a way that is not apocalyptic but extremely chillin never the less.
Well now I want to see the Top Ten Most Depressing Movies for the overlap.
Hadashi no Gen is pretty cool, the guy who made it also appeared in White Light Black Rain, which is a great documentary
the lists just keep on staying great!
While nuclear war is something horrible I could never get myself to feel sorry for the japs as victims of Nuclear warfare. I always saw it as a way of watering down their own faults and taking the victim role. A great example of this is the basically every person from the West (as in anglosaxon countries- that includes Australia and New Zealand) heard about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasiki rarely anyone knows about German and Jap war crimes such as the bombings pf Rotterdam, Warsaw or Belgrade, massacre of Nanking and Manilla, Black Christmas, Comfort Women not even going into operation Sanko, concentration camps and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Tere were many cities that suffered more (Warsaw being the prime example as after the Warsaw uprising – not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the city was burned to the ground and became the most devastated city of World War II (85% of buildings destroyed). Further more the Japs and and especially the Germans had it rather good at the home front for quite some time (especially the germans whose standard of living up until 1944 was higher than before the war – the japs weren’t so lucky but up until 1943 also didn’t have it so bad). I also think this stems from the fact that neither England, USA or Kangarooland and NZ were in fact eever occupied by the axis. England did have the bombings but compared to eastern europe or china it’s barely worth mentioning. America and Down under lands suffered minor inconviences at best. The axis killed more people in Poland, Ukraine or Byelorussia in a year the in GB through out the entire war. And even then it was mostly soldier casaulties, while in Eastern Europe and Asia it wss mostly civilians. While the Germans behaved in Western Europe in the East they let loose. The japs also didn’t hold back in Asia. So it’s pretty hard to feel any sort of sympathy when you walk through a city where on every wall you have a plaque that says here Germans shot 50 Poles or here Germans shot 40 Jews. China and Poland suffered higher loses than the axis and no one cares. There are hardly any known movies about Nanking or the Warsaw uprising (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is also unlucky – the pianist is way overrated) . I also didn’t mention the USSR on purpose as for any Eastern European like me they are the same category as the axis only with a different ideology. Not to mention the fact that the Russians count the deaths of Ukrainiens, Byelorussians and other “voluntary” members of the USSR as their own.
But apart from what I wrote above this an interesting list. I’ll have to watch some of these movies. I read the manga barefoot Gen and there is no difference from the movie. I’d even say it’s more terryfing. Also the black rain is freaking scary.
Good Job Stl, You have been doing a really good job. Im happy your a fellow st louis native.
well, i was having a good day. now i’m depressed…to not see Terminator on this list!!!!
why in hells name are the people in the bbc series drinking the god damn rain?
Excellent list… although my favorite nuclear war TV memory is the infamous Twilight Zone episode where Burgess Merideth
breaks his glasses.
Okay list… though I question the choice of “Trinity and Beyond,” which is a great documentary, yes, but is mainly about atomic bomb testing, not so much war itself. A better choice there might have been “The Atomic Cafe.”
Also missing are the many cheesy flicks from the Fifties and Sixties about atomic war and its aftermath, but as most of these are just that–cheesy–it’s sensible that they don’t appear alongside the likes of films like “Threads” and “Fail Safe” and “Doctor Strangelove.”
I’m thinking of films like “Panic in the Year Zero,” and “Children of the Damned” and such.
However, one truly weird film I’d have inserted here: “The Bedsitting Room,” a British film from the late sixties about the aftermath of WWIII in Britain. Not serious at all–a black comedy/satire more than anything else–but still interesting.
“The Day After” I remember distinctly. I was 18 when that was shown on television, just graduating from high school. It wasn’t the best–”Testament” was far better–but something about “The Day After” got to a lot of us. Scared the beejeezus out of many of my friends at the time.
I’ll say one thing about this, in that vein. What some of these films can do, horrible as their subject matter is, is to teach the younger set out there—those that are in their teens and twenties now, some even in their early thirties–what it was like for us who grew up in the midst of the Cold War. And I wasn’t even there for the truly tense part of it, in the Fifties, and just missed being alive for the Cuban Missile Crisis by a couple years. But even so, growing up in the late Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties was at times filled with a terrifying tension for which kids these days have no concept. The atomic-air-raid drills at school… the constant worry you’d feel when international tensions ran high over some crisis or other–the Middle East, for instance, or Eastern Europe… the concern that it could at any time get out of hand, and get away from us. The fear that maybe the Russians were nutty enough to try a first strike in Europe–we *knew* they could grind right through Germany if they wanted to, in no time–and we’d have to respond with nuclear weapons, and that would be it… the chain reactions would begin, and it’d be the end. It was no joke, and no movie, and it wasn’t funny or romantic or interesting, the way “normal” war can seem to kids, when they see it at a distance.
Now that fear is all gone. I can go home today and turn on the news, and it can be very bad, yes–terrorists can kill hundreds in Bombay or thousands in New York–we can be involved in seemingly-endless conflicts in Asia and the Middle East…there can be constant unrest in and around Israel or Africa… there can be a nut-job totalitarian throwback like Hugo Chavez in South America… and as bad as it all gets, it still never feels like it could spill over into the End. Even with North Korea and Iran trying to get nuclear weapons… even if they could explode one somewhere (please no) killing thousands or millions—it wouldn’t be the same as those years of Mutual Assured Destruction. It may not SEEM better, but in that one sense, it is.
It isn’t just that there isn’t a cold war stalemate between two superpowers anymore, though of course that’s most of it. It’s that we HAD that, we lived through it, for 50-odd years… and we didn’t let it happen. We were sensible enough to step back from the edge. Let’s remember something about that–NEVER in human history–NEVER–have two closely-matched and deeply antagonistic enemies stood face to face like that for SO LONG, and then backed away without destroying each other. There were idiots and whackos on both sides during the Cold War, but it’s reassuring to know that in a larger, more important sense, Americans and Russians were equally sane about it, and we both managed to take a step towards life and the future rather than death and the end. Good for us. That says something nice about the entire human race. Presented with the means to annihilate ourselves, we who have always been self-destructive and erratic at times, as a species, didn’t go for it. We showed restraint and sanity.
“On the Beach” has always been my favorite of the bunch. So, in typical Listverse fashion, I read the list title, though of “On the Beach,” and found it on the list. Therefore, this list is stamped with the warrrreagl 100% A+ approval sticker.
dr. stranglelove seems like its too low on the list
Wow. This is a very depressing subject. But it is a (very important) part of history. Kudos on the list.
Hadashi no Gen is gruesome and horrifying, but that’s because those things actually did happen when the bomb went off. Even though it’s animation, it’s pretty accurate. Definitely not fo those with a weak stomach.
Also, I thought Dr. Strangelove was gonna be higher up, but to be honest I haven’t seen most of the other films and documentaries, so perhaps it’s okay where it is.
Wow. So I just watched When the wind blows on youtube after reading this list and it made me cry: ( Animated movies with serious messages really bum me out more then normal films! Great list though!
what, no Boy & His Dog?
joke, joke.
gotta love a post-apocalyptic movie staring don johnson trying to get into the pants of every living female left, though.
dammien karras – Yes indeed, that was a great Twilight Zone episode.
Lalalilo – I was waiting for someone to bring that up, though I’m a little surprised it took 36 comments.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were unique in the way that the cities were bombed — but not unique in the scale of destruction. As you alluded to, the Allied firebombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, etc. and the German bombings of London produced widespread destruction and loss of life. In 1945, AT THAT MOMENT, the atomic bombs were seen as a much more efficient way to do something that took fleets of aircraft and thousands of incindiaries and HE.
When putting together this list, I both looked backwards to the atomic attacks from the comfort of 2008, and also kept in mind what an old Marine vet of the Pacific war told me. He said, when I interviewed him about 15 years ago, that he would have been among those who would have had to invade the Japanese home islands. He was absolutely certain that the atomic bombs saved not only his life, but the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans AND millions of Japanese. With the intensity of the Pacific war only getting worse, he said, if Truman had a way to end it before an invasion needed to happen, then halleluiah.
And while it may seem hard for you to feel sympathy for citizens of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, keep in mind that the events in August 1945 were a milestone in human history, and the only — thus far, thank God — episodes of the use of nuclear weapons.
Lark
!!
T-1000, The Terminator was released in 1984. T2, 1991.
Well you don’t have to worry because a lot lot of whats in these films is technically rubbish. Certainly it wouldn’t be nice to be anywhere near a nuclear explosion especially within the outer lethal zone but to portray nuclear war as the ‘end of the world’ was always a lie.
Ironically the most accurate film about nuclear war was probably Akira because it takes society about 20 to 40 years to recover afterwards. In a real war a lot would die – up to 200 to 500 million people, plus another 50 to 100 million from remote radiation poisoning, and the US certainly wouldn’t recover very easily. But many nations wouldn’t even been have hit and at least half the worlds population wouldn’t even be threatened.
As for nuclear winter its all a bit of a fantasy – 100 years ago Mt Krakatoa put 10 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, as much as thousands of nuclear bombs, and the Victorians survived. As a Gen Scientist I have done environmental *****ysis of nuclear war and the bitter truth is that in most cases it is actually much greener than modern society.
“The Day After” received more hype than any TV movie before or after. Professional counselors and psychologists all chimed in regarding who should watch it, what to do if somebody faints, warnings against watching it alone, how parents should talk to their children, etc. In the end it wasn’t any more powerful than “The Towering Inferno.” The most compelling movie on this awful subject is, IMHO, “Testamant.” The intimate anguish of that film delivers a very powerful blow.
Talking about WWII I heard that the biggest military crime of the war was the US fire-bombing of Tokyo. By some estimates it killed in one night more than both atomic bombs put together and more than died in Britain in the whole war. I could also point out that the Nagasaki bomb was particularly ugly because the Japanese were already preparing to surrender and America knew it. They were basically testing their new weapon.
The Nazi’s have the excuse that they were fascists, but we have to face the fact that in the end days of the war both Britain and the US fire bombed civilians en-mass – and largely not even for military reasons.
Threads.. I was around 13 when that was shown. Scared the daylights out of me.
It was so ordinary…then suddenly everything went wrong..
It was a scary time, the cold war.
lucien: the problem isn’t that the damage isn’t extensive enough, at least for those outside of the immediate blast area. the problem is for the inevitable return volley that is sure to follow.
it would be surprising if a single bomb exploded in the future.
I personally think Fail-Safe should be higher (probably number 1) because it’s just so good and where is War Games a British documentry style programme from the 60′s that the government banned at the time and was first shown on the 80′s.
*hadashi no gen*
so damn depressing
There’s a lot of anti-US hatred on this board. No surprise there. I’ve seen it at this site often. Japan was NOT on the verge of surrender before the first bomb. If they were, how come it took TWO bombs to make them surrender? After the first, they figured that’s all we had and no surrender was on it’s way. After the second they figured we meant business and took the US more seriously. I guess some folks here LIKE the idea of a million Americans dying in an invasion. BTW, good list but DR Strangelove s/be higher.
I have to admit, at first I was shocked that Dr. Strangelove placed so low, but after I saw the inclusions of all the documentaries, it made sense. Not sure if I agree exactly with the order, but still a very well through out, researched list.
39. warningdontreadthis: First, whomever the bombs didn’t kill were extremely dehydrated. The bombs evaporated a lot of moisure in the air. Secondly, this was the first time this had ever happened and they had no idea what radiation was. In that position, if I had no water and I was dying of thirst, I may want to risk drinking black rain if I had no idea it was contaminated.
I’ve only seen two on the list (the other being White Light/Black Rain), which saddens me because it’s a topic I am fascinated with. The pikadon classification that came later in Japanese society really intrigued me.
I knew Threads would be number 1. I remember the horror of this film 25 yrs on. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set to be released next year. I hope it does justice to the book!
asmz…………. I think computers are region free in terms of dvds. Not sure I’d recommend Threads though. A scary and thought provoking film, but not exactly a recommendation for an enjoyable evenings viewing. Similarly The Road, when it hits cinemas, not sure I’ll be there. Too grim on a big screen.