1965: THE WAR GAME

What’s it about?

A Chinese incursion into South Vietnam sparks a rapid escalation of the Cold War which results in a Soviet blockade of Berlin. NATO mechanized infantry trying to force their way into the city clash with the East German army. As the fighting heats up, commanders on the battlefield make use of existing NATO protocols to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Presented in documentary style, THE WAR GAME follows the reaction of U.K. citizens to these developments and the implementation of emergency measures designed to prepare the population for all-out war with the U.S.S.R. When the Soviets respond by launching their mid-range ballistic missiles at targets in Europe, the survivors in the English countryside must face all the unimaginable horrors of nuclear war.




Is it any good?

It is incredibly good, but -- fair warning -- pretty terrifying. The older I get, the more frightening the whole Cold War seems to me. I think partly it’s because I’m not a kid anymore and I can actually understand what it would mean if civilization as we knew it suddenly ceased to exist. But it’s also partly because I never heard much about what the realities would be if worse finally did come to worst back in the cold war days. Certainly there were some people talking about it -- hence the existence of movies like THE WAR GAME -- but for the most part folks just seemed willing to ignore it and trust Ronald Reagan not to get us all killed.

THE WAR GAME starts out by quickly sketching a plausible scenario for how a nuclear war might start. Berlin is the immediate flashpoint for the war -- and it’s implied that NATO commanders might be the first to use tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the city from being captured by Soviet or East German forces. This conclusion is based on what were supposedly real directives in place at the time for battlefield commanders. In THE WAR GAME, the big red button gets pushed by a relatively low ranking officer on the field who is responding to a tactical situation.

A lot of nuclear war movies never get specific about “who started it”. It’s probably true that the survivors would never have a clear picture of what exactly happened, and of course there’s a message in that approach about how we are all more or less equally responsible. But by being perfectly explicit about exactly what happens, THE WAR GAME achieves a level of reality (or at least plausibility) that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The documentary style lets the movie stop and explain how one action follows inevitably from the other. For instance, the way the Soviets stored many of their warheads (above-ground, attached to highly explosive rockets) meant that they would have to launch them all in the early minutes of a nuclear conflict or risk losing all their remaining missiles in the counterstrike. By the time THE WAR GAME is over, it seems pretty unbelievable that we somehow got out of the Cold War alive.




The movie also deflates most of the so-called preparations that the British civil defense office were advising citizens to take in the event of nuclear war at the time. England is a relatively small target, and the best estimates at the time seemed to indicate that the Soviet Union had enough nuclear missiles allocated to the country to obliterate it many times over. The civil defense guidelines called for a mass evacuation of women and children (but not men) from population centers to less built-up areas away from tactical targets. But for a heavily urbanized country like England, that would have required shifting a huge percentage of its population to areas without the resources to take on the extra population. Even without an accompanying war, the very act of evacuation would have devastated the country’s economy.

By the time the bombs start falling, the movie has already both tracked the extensive preparations that people are told to take and debunked those preparations as mostly worthless. The immediate effects of the attack should be familiar to anybody who’s read John Hersey’s HIROSHIMA -- people blinded and burned by the flashes, houses flattened by shock waves, horrific firestorms raging in the cities, and most of the surviving population wandering around in deep shock. In fact, this part of the movie is familiar enough that it almost counts as a comforting stretch simply because the horrors are the expected ones. The long term effects continue with the onset of radiation sickness, food shortages, the implementation of martial law, and widespread lawlessness and rioting.

There is no hopeful ending either. THE WAR GAME returns at the end to studies of the survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and concludes that the psychological effects will be permanent and devastating. And the worst affected will be the children who grow up in a world that has little or none of the moral framework that civilization has refined over thousands of years. A full scale nuclear war truly would be a descent back into the Dark Ages where the strongest and most ruthless would be rewarded with slightly longer lives than everybody else.




What else happened this year?

-- THE 10TH VICTIM follows two participants in a futuristic game where the contestants (as in all futuristic games) try to kill each other. One of the first and also one of the best movies of the type, it focuses on a pretty intriguing cat and mouse scenario between Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastrioanni.
-- Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE is more interesting (and confusing) than enjoyable. Better people than I probably like it quite a lot, but I found it mostly incomprehensible and dull.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1965...

Go with THE WAR GAME. Unless you’re not in the mood to be totally depressed, in which case make it THE 10TH VICTIM. I can’t think of a better flick about those ultra-violent future games that we’ll all be playing in a decade or so. Mostly this is because it has one neat twist (the participants don’t necessarily know who they’re supposed to be trying to kill) that makes the game more about manipulation and nerves than it is about murder.