A docu-drama showing the UK’s preparedness for a nuclear strike.
Initially withheld from release by the BBC, The War Game won the Oscar for best doc in 1967, and was finally broadcast by the BBC in 1985.
Running less than an hour, it is a terrfiying document of its time, and a sadly evergreen.
After Culloden, The War Game takes the juxtaposition of hypothetical and literal to its most chilling extreme, interspersing government advice with the potential consequences.
The film intercuts talking heads with scenes set in an English town, from the chaos of rationing and evacuation, to - most chillingly - the incineration of a family trapped in their house.
Coldly documenting the rapid breakdown in society as the limitations of the UK’s nuclear war preparations are laid bare, the film creates a mounting sense of futility.
The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons is always front of mind, as is humanity’s complete inability to control these death machines.
What is more terrifying is the seeming indifference of institutions to the potential cataclysm.
At times it verges on satire - the government representative revealing a pamphlet on nuclear fallout is not free but being sold for 9 pence - but the cumulative effect is despair.
Post-COVID, the scenes of institutional figures rationalising their lack of preparation, and the cutaways to people discriminating against each other as conditions get worse, hit the hardest.
The dangers The War Game highlights are still with us, but the film’s greatest success is in the implications it carries about our collective and individual reactions to major catastrophe.
A primal scream that is still reverberating decades later, The War Game is worth a look.
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