What’s it about?
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Monday, March 1, 2010
Monday, May 4, 2009
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.
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.
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