The Day After - The day after

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title The Day After - The day after
Original title The Day After
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1983
length 122 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Nicholas Meyer
script Edward Hume
production Stephanie Austin
Robert A. Papazian Jr.
music David Raksin
camera Gayne Rescher
cut William Paul Dornisch
Robert Florio
occupation

The Day After is a 1983 American television film that explores the effects of a fictional nuclear war in the United States. In Europe it was initially shown in cinemas. In Germany it started in cinemas on December 2, 1983.

action

The film plot can be divided into three phases:

The prehistory of the film shows a scenario conceivable during the Cold War that leads to the outbreak of a war between the superpowers. The viewers only experience the political background indirectly through radio or television reports; At the same time, the main characters are introduced who react in different ways to the political crisis and who criticize the nuclear arms race.

The main part of the film, the nuclear war , is initiated through the use of nuclear weapons. After the destruction of the NATO headquarters, the American commander-in-chief decides to launch a nuclear strike and transmits the launch codes. The teams in the atomic silos are running a “NATO program”, the Soviet Union is carrying out a counterattack with 300 ICBMs , leaving it open which of the two superpowers will carry out the first strike . The detonation of the nuclear weapons turned downtown Kansas City and the surrounding area into a desert, leaving behind a few survivors who either found shelter in bunkers or wandered helplessly in the open. In a hospital that has remained intact, some doctors are now trying to treat the wounded.

The final part of the film shows the limited effects of the atomic strike and takes place two weeks after the nuclear war, which many people survived. But in these two weeks it is not possible to bring the country back under state authority . Anomie rules the country, many people suffer from radiation sickness . The film has an open ending and prophesies a bleak and hopeless future for western society: the survivors are confronted with the challenges of a destroyed society. America is being transformed into a pre-industrial structure whose inhabitants have to make do with primitive technical means because the infrastructure has been destroyed. The cities are uninhabitable, many houses have been destroyed. Refugee camps are springing up everywhere whose residents cannot be adequately supplied with food. There is a lack of medication in the remaining hospitals, and epidemics are threatening to break out. The army takes control and has people shot at random without trial. The president and his cabinet have survived and are drafting impracticable laws to rebuild the country. People arm and kill each other in order to survive.

The main message of the film is that nuclear war would result in the complete destruction of America. In the film, the nuclear strike through the USSR is carried out with 300 missiles. Since a large part of the ICBM was already equipped with multiple warheads at the beginning of the 1980s (e.g. SS-19 with six warheads), if 300 missiles were used, well over a thousand nuclear warheads would have fallen on the USA. In this context, one has to keep in mind that in 2013 the US had 295 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. H. assuming that a warhead would have been aimed at each of these cities, the number of warheads would not only have been enough to destroy them all, but even to do this several times, thus triggering the often-invoked nuclear "overkill".

However, the film leaves open which of the two superpowers is ultimately to blame for the escalation of the conflict; Even a speech by the American president that was broadcast on the radio after the attacks did not answer this question, nor did it answer the question of who was to be regarded as the "winner" of the war.

Conception

The main location of the film is the university town of Lawrence near the large city of Kansas City and its rural surroundings. The action is thus placed in the heartland of the USA, whose inhabitants are particularly religious and connected to traditions, and thus exemplarily shows how this rural idyll is being destroyed and even in this traditional society all values ​​are lost after the nuclear war and people are only an Think survival. Lawrence is the central location because the city of Kansas City is destroyed by the nuclear strike. At the same time, many ICBMs are stationed in Lawrence for the war with the Soviet Union, so that the idyll is deceptive from the start. The scenes of the film showing the atomic bombing were made using real film footage of nuclear weapons tests .

characters

The focus of the film is on Dr. Oakes, who tried to run the small university hospital in Lawrence after the nuclear attack, and the Dahlberg family, who survived in their basement that had been converted into a bunker.

The Dahlberg family run a large farm, Jim Dahlberg is a proud and conservative farmer who lives on the produce of his land. The older daughter is about to get married and causes strange situations through her nightly antics with her future husband, the mother is in the preparations for the wedding celebration when the catastrophe falls. The Dahlbergs survived the nuclear war in a bunker that was actually used to protect against tornadoes, where they had to stay in the dark for two weeks. After the radioactive fallout has subsided and the Dahlbergs can leave the basement again, they try to get on with their lives, but this is impossible. The older daughter suffers from radiation sickness and will likely die, her fiancé is believed to have perished, and the Dahlbergs' son is seriously injured. He was blinded when he looked into a flash of light from a nuclear explosion. Jim Dahlberg is shot dead by refugees who slaughtered one of his cattle. Its harvest has been destroyed, the sowing of new grain impossible because the earth is contaminated - the government's proposal to remove the entire upper soil layer seems like a mockery to the farmers because it is absolutely impracticable. Jim's wife, who hears the shots, and the younger daughter are left alone.

Dr. Oakes is portrayed as a level-headed family man at a ripe old age who, unlike all the other characters, is extremely concerned about the political crisis. He loves his wife and has two grown children, but all three die in the Kansas City attack. Dr. Oakes only survives because he is near Lawrence at the time of the attack. There he took over the management of the hospital and tried to save lives with the other doctors with the limited resources available after the nuclear inferno. Because he has to assume that his wife and children are dead and that his life no longer offers any prospects, he works his way up to utter exhaustion; At the end of the film he has become an old man and, after finding the charred remains of his wife's wristwatch, breaks down crying in the ruins of his house, while he hugs a homeless man whom he just wanted to evict from his "house".

Another character is the soldier Billy McCoy, who belongs to the crew of a missile position. As a simple soldier, he is a long way from the high-ranking military who drove the arms race, but apparently he did not seriously believe that the Cold War could one day lead to a military conflict - at least he always told his wife that it would never will be called a "correct" mission. But now he has to go to the missile silo, although he actually wanted to go to his mother-in-law with his wife and son. After the rockets have been fired from the position, he leaves the scene without authorization while his comrades remain in the empty rocket silo according to the orders and will presumably perish if hit. On his escape, Billy experienced the atomic bomb attack and was exposed to high levels of radioactivity when he was outside. At the end of the film, he went to death with severe radiation sickness. His wife and son were probably killed in the attack.

reception

The film, which was explicitly designed with the aim of having a strong impact on the general public, portrayed the consequences of such a nuclear attack for the first time in a Hollywood film at the time. The interests of the mass audience and the medium of television were taken into account to the extent that they were limited to the American population and, for example, the deaths of main characters were not played out. The plot of the film ends several weeks after the attacks, so it focuses on the short-term aftermath. Other aspects such as the nuclear winter are only hinted at. However, this film sparked a discussion in the US and Europe. At the time, for many, the film represented the most radical portrayal of nuclear war.

The same theme was featured in the British film Threads in 1984 and When the Wind Glows in 1986 .

In contrast to films such as Top Gun , which received generous support from the US military, the Pentagon was anything but enthusiastic about this film project in advance and is said to have tried to prevent it.

The film is the most successful television film to date. In the US alone, more than 100 million viewers tuned in. In other countries it was first shown in cinemas. In Germany, 3.6 million saw him in the cinema.

Awards

  • The film won an Emmy in 1983 for effects and sound editing . He was nominated for an Emmy in ten other categories.
  • In the Federal Republic of Germany, the film received the golden screen for three million viewers in the cinema.
  • Doug Scott won a Young Artist Award .

Reviews

“With the means of American television films, despite its dramaturgical weaknesses, made to have a strong impact, whereby the production argues less than it creates fear. The uncompromising attitude with which the topic is dealt with can nevertheless be conducive to discussion. "

- Lexicon of international film

"Still scary."

- MaryAnn Johanson, 2005

Trivia

The then President of the United States and former actor, Ronald Reagan , believed the possibility of a nuclear war that the United States could win as a given. He saw the film at Camp David on the morning of October 10, 1983 and was very impressed by it. In his autobiography, he said the film depressed him deeply and led him to a new perspective on the subject. In September 1983 it was thanks to the level-headedness of the officer Stanislaw Petrov that there was no nuclear war. He recognized a false alarm from a Soviet early warning system as such and thus presumably prevented a nuclear exchange. At the beginning of November, the crisis situation surrounding the Able Archer 83 exercise also took place.

Some scenes in The Day After came from the 1979 documentary First Strike , which is about a (fictional) surprise atomic attack by the Soviet Union on the USA.

In July 2018, a so-called rough cut of the film was published on the Internet. This contains almost fifteen minutes more footage. This includes numerous complete scenes, such as an ethical discussion among hospital staff as to whether the terminally ill radiation victims should still be supplied with the scarce supply of medication. This rough cut was not officially published and is only available in relatively poor quality.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Day After. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  2. ^ MaryAnn Johanson: The Day After, Threads, Testament, and Special Bulletin (review). In: FlickPhilosopher. August 6, 2005, accessed on April 5, 2009 (English): "still terrifying as hell"
  3. ↑ Ronald Reagan, Autobiography: Memories. An American life. Propylaeen, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-549-07227-9
  4. ^ "How Ronald Reagan Learned To Start Worrying And Stop Loving The Bomb" report in Empire , 2010
  5. ↑ Markus Haage: Small sensation: Rough Cut from “The Day After” surfaced! In: Neon-Zombie.net. Markus Haage Medien, July 8, 2018, accessed on July 9, 2018 .