Review of Threads (1985) by Allan C — 29 Jun 2009

The 1980s were awash with post-nuclear apocalyptic films. The atmosphere during the Cold War was tantamount to sociological paranoid schizophrenia. As those kind of movies pointed out, it wasn't an entirely unreasonable mindset. With the emotional strings of mass public ripe for pulling, movie execs put out as many apocalyptic films as possible to fill what was for a time a hollow quota. Like any mass produced product, most were forgettable at best, some endearing simply for their subject matter and aims (when not jingoistic propaganda), and few actually top quality, even fewer bonified art. While movie houses were churning out profit racking money traps, how interesting that one of the very best of the genre was made as a TV docudrama by the BBC (another excellent film, which I'll also review, was also made for tv in the US, Testament, though when producers saw its quality, they pushed it on to the big screen).

Threads amounts to a by the numbers procedural. The film begins with the story of a young couple, pregnant, and contemplating their future. We meet their families, and others, among them a political bureaucrat. The first half of the movie deals with the buildup to war. TV reports telecast news of escalating confrontations between the US and USSR. War breaks out and nukes are used. Protests mount in the streets as the UK becomes trapped in the nuclear vortex. Inevitably, bombs begin to fall on it.

When the nuclear strikes occur, the imagery is frightening and unforgettable. But it's the aftermath that truly gives Threads its disturbing legacy legitimacy. Most of the rest of the film focuses on Ruth, the pregnant fiance. She stays with her parents in their ruined flat for a time, then goes out into the streets of Sheffield in search of her lover, and then eventually just food and a means of surviving. The area is reduced to rubble, and it is assumed with the amount of fighting reported before the blasts that so is everywhere else. Nuclear dust clogs the skies, there is no sunlight to be seen. Those who are not dying from fallout are dying of hunger, or possibly marauding bands of looters, or even the ruthless guns of the authorities. Ruth eventually has her child, a daughter. The movies jumps forwards in time, throughout the time of the initial survivors, to the nuclear children, the next generation.

The movie is punctuated by on screen statistics, providing us with information we'd rather not be privy to. A voice occasionally briefly narrates as if it were a real documentary. But the real star is the imagery. Threads has no standard plot so to speak, but simply follows. There is a beginning, but no middle. The end, however, is quite symbolically the end. There is little hope in the film. What hope their is is provided by ourselves and our own internal predilection for optimism. By some turns, Threads is overbearingly pessimistic, others though insist it may be optimistic. If the latter is correct, let me be vapourized upon impact, please.

Stylistically, Threads is barren, dirty, bloody, uninhabitable. The filmmakers do a painfully good job considering the technology of the 80s. The storm of dialogue coming from all angles in the beginning half of the film - from people, from radios, and tvs, often simultaneously - gives way to screams of panic and desperation, and finally to near silence. The final acts of the film are most without dialogue, what there is is sparse and passe. After all, as it is said, the world goes out not with a bang, but a whimper.