The Armageddon Awards: The Greatest Achievements from the Age of Nuclear Fear! Part One

PART ONE

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the happy days when none of us kids were sure we’d live long enough to lose our hair. Not naturally, anyway. And if someone asked what you’d be like growing up, your mind would be filled with images nobody liked to discuss. Occasionally, one of those images would appear on a movie screen or TV. So here, submitted for your approval, are a few of them, the finest to come out of the age of nuclear fear (in my opinion, anyway). Please write and let us know if you have any questions. Our first category is:

Most Doom-Laden Opening Credits

Stock footage of atomic explosions! Biblical quotes! Fast-moving clouds! It’s all there in Arch Oboler’s Five (1951). This first doomsday drama of the Cold War single-handedly set the pattern for 1950s sci-fi movie credits, and with the addition of doom-laden narration and throbbing electric instruments, would lend Cold War unease to films as varied as Killers From Space (1954), Gigantis the Fire Monster (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and even The Killer Shrews (1959).

The credits of Roger Corman’s The Day the World Ended (1955) are practically a remake of Five’s, with monsters added (which accurately describes the film itself). However, when Corman put his imprint on the end-of-the-world theme with Last Woman On Earth (1960), his credits unroll over a painting of a reclining woman’s body. The camera slowly pans across her while melancholy music plays. The effect is stark, almost elemental, as if contemplating the fate of an individual woman and simultaneously the very idea of women.

A female voice dreamily sings over footage of rolling mushroom clouds. The opening credits of Creation of the Humanoids (1962) evoke a mood of resigned detachment. The unthinkable has already happened in its future world, and we can only contemplate its images. [EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION: Did Stanley Kubrick think of Creation of the Humanoids as he crafted the closing moments of Dr. Strangelove (1964)?]

However, the Armageddon Award for the eeriest, most evocative doomsday movie credits would have to go to:

Split Second (1953). An arid landscape, its desert soil cracked into a jigsaw of dried-out earth, shimmers with the heat of what may or may not be a setting sun. Shadows that become human figures, dark silhouettes plodding across the desert, enter the frame. The image is alarming, with the stark, suggestive simplicity of a 1950s paperback cover.

Most Doom-Laden Opening Narration

Dr. Strangelove (1964): “For more than a year, ominous rumors had been privately circulating among high-level Western leaders that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top-secret Russian project to the perpetually fog-shrouded wasteland below the Arctic peaks of the Zhokhov Islands. What they were building or why it should be in such a remote and desolate place no one could say.”

“The Twilight Zone” episode “Third From the Sun” (1960): “5:30 p.m.: Quitting time at the plant. It's time for supper now. It's time for families. It's time for a cool drink on a porch. It's time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before the storm. This is the eve of the end.”

But the Award goes to:

“The Outer Limits” episode “The Architects of Fear” (1963): “Is this the day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time to wonder or ask, ‘Why is it happening? Why is it finally happening?’ There is time only for fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray? Or do we merely run now and pray later? Will there be a later? Or is this the day?”

Best Depiction of People Waiting for the End of the World

Split Second (1953)—A handful of unlucky civilians held captive in a western ghost town near ground zero of a nuclear test site wait for the detonation at dawn. Contemplating the uses they have made of their lives against a landscape of crumbling ruins, their vigil evokes a feeling of living at the end of time.

In These are the Damned (1963), people vacation, fight, work, make love. And in the background, coloring all their actions, hovers the idea that the end of their days is near. Some ignore it, some expunge it via a moment’s violence or sex, and some spend their lives preparing for “When the time comes.”

“The Twilight Zone” episode “Third From the Sun” (1960)—Late into the night, a group of friends sit in a suburban living room, playing cards with desperate intensity.

And the Award goes to:

La Jetee (1962)—A time traveler from a post-nuclear future spends the ebbing weeks of peace with a beautiful woman he knows will not survive. They talk, go to museums, and spend lingering mornings in bed. More than any other film, La Jetee hauntingly evokes that almost-urgent, almost-poignant feeling I remember so well from the Cold War of going on with a life that could end at any moment.

Most Convincing Background Noise of Approaching Doomsday

Few films have depicted the half-heard radio and television news reports of slowly approaching doom as David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977). However, we are concerned with nuclear films here, and few evoke the stomach-tightening feeling that glancing at headlines could have in those days. There was an episode of the TV series “Lou Grant” broadcast May 3, 1982, entitled “Unthinkable,” in which the reporters track down various stories while the news out of the Middle East keeps getting worse and worse until a politician breaks down in panic and starts blabbing to the press that preparations for actual war have begun.

However, the Armageddon Award goes to:

Believe it or not, a 1972 episode of “Mission: Impossible.” In “Two Thousand,” the Impossible Mission Force faces their ultimate challenge: convincing a plutonium smuggler that World War III is about to break out, feeding pre-recorded news reports into his home radio and television about an escalating international crisis. Let me tell you, it was creepy listening back in the day.

Most Believable Argument by a Government Official About Going Nuclear

Hiroshima (1995): “Now, we’ve got the bomb and the chance to use it. For Jesus sake, let’s use it where the Japs will FEEL it the most. Sir.”

Dr. Strangelove (1964): “Mr. President … it is necessary now to make a choice; to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but distinguishable post-war environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other, where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.”

Best Depiction of the Moment Everyone Realizes the Time Has Finally Come

While making Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick said that when nuclear war breaks out in a movie, you watch a documentary if the setting is an Air Force base. If the setting is a bedroom, you watch a drama; if you’re in a bathroom, it’s a comedy. Threads (1984) is anything but a comedy, but some jokester put that moment in, all the same.

In The Day After (1983), speechless Kansans glance up to see minuteman missiles gracefully arcing into the sky from silos that seem to be stationed in every cornfield, culminating in the jaw-dropping sight of the entire population of Lawrence, Kansas looking up at the vapor trails from their seats at a football game (and believe me, they love their football).

But no behavior so underlines the idea that every other aspect of human life has suddenly become trivial, better than Miracle Mile (1988) when a squad of police officers chasing a suspected cop killer suddenly drop everything they are doing and run home.

The Most Believable Individual Response to the News

Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove: “Oh, hell. Are the Russians involved?”

Bibi Besch in The Day After: One cannot help but sympathize with this farmer’s wife who, after learning that missiles are streaking towards Kansas, sets to work making all the beds in her house. When her husband finally drags her downstairs, she can no longer stave off the panic and falls into screaming hysteria.

But we proudly present the Award to:

Anthony Edwards in Miracle Mile: A young man picks up a ringing pay phone and gets the wrong number from a guy in a missile silo calling his wife to tell his Dad they are less than an hour from launching. The young man steps into a nearby diner, breathing heavily, shaking his head, and drumming his fingers, trying to tell himself that this is just a joke, just a prank, but knowing in his heart that today is the day and this is it. Edwards perfectly nails that familiar feeling of sheer bone-deep fear that I used to describe as “Feeling an aching hole open up in your stomach.” Oh yeah, I remember that!

Most Memorable Excuse from a Government Official

Dr. Strangelove: “Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”

Most Convincing Dramatization of the Minutes After the Sirens Go Off

A great scene in The Lost Missile (1958) of panicking New Yorkers crowding onto the last subway train out of the city. After it pulls away, citizens leap onto the tracks and chase after it.

The Italian film The Day the Sky Exploded (1958) brings a natural you-are-there feeling for what it would be like to be carried along by a mob racing into a shelter.

Threads (1984): The telefilm’s budget doesn’t allow much scope in showing the scene. It knits together several little scenes of people in grocery stores piling belongings into cars and gas stations being shut down. But to dramatize the sheer scope of the panic, you would have to see:

The Day After: There are the sights you’ve always imagined. Sirens blaring while people run in the streets like ants. Individuals scampering in different directions, turning into huge mobs. Tides of pedestrians pouring into shelters. Cars banging into abandoned vehicles as they try to reach the highway. There is bumper-to-bumper traffic out of Kansas City, while the lanes leading in are practically empty.

Most Believable Off-the-Cuff Remark from a Live TV or Radio Announcer

The Lost Missile: “I’ve just been informed that we’ll switch to a special bulletin. Please keep this in mind. So long as you have your faith, you’ll be alive and well. So, keep your faith.”

Rocket Attack U.S.A. (1958): “Pat, dear, if you can hear me, it just dawned on me that I probably won’t see you or little Bill again. If this is because I’ve been stubborn, I’m sorry. Because I love you.”

Best Mushroom Cloud (Not Using Stock Footage and Before Computer Animation)

Filmed inside a water tank using chemical dyes, The Beginning or the End (1947) features Hollywood’s first artificial mushroom cloud. It looks particularly dark and unnatural, churning angrily as it surges skyward, perhaps modeled on newsreel footage of the ash cloud from the 1944 eruption of Vesuvius. [TRIVIA EXTRA CREDIT: This stock footage is used in Above and Beyond (1952).]

The special effects crew of George Pals’ The War of the Worlds (1953) used to smoke in the open air to create a colorful, skinny Technicolor cloud that compares well with contemporary footage of desert A-bomb tests. However, it lacks the dark atmospherics achieved at The Beginning or the End.

Sodom and Gomorrah (1962): While the sequence depicting the lord’s wrath upon the Sodomites consists primarily of conventional earthquake imagery, it concludes with an impressive fireball that turns to white smoke out of which a malevolent black cauliflower of soot rises over the ruins of the famous Biblical sin city.

Zabriskie Point (1970): They just blew up an entire ranch house to create a remarkable mushroom cloud. Please don’t take my word for it; fast forward to the last five minutes.

Panic In Year Zero (1962): For low-budget ingenuity, you must hand it to this AIP drive-in flick crew. They take a photograph from the Bikini Atoll and use it as a matte painting to depict a mushroom cloud standing over Los Angeles. Being a still photo, the image is motionless, but if you fast forward during the sequence, you will notice that the effects crew push the exposure meter back and forth. Hence, the image repeatedly darkens and flashes, giving the cloud the illusion of motion. Clever.

But much as I may admire Poverty Row’s creativity, the Award must go to:

The Day After sprouts not one but several angry red mushrooms to depict H-bombs destroying the state of Kansas. They start a bright orange, then darken to a yellowish brown. These appear to have been done using chemical dyes in water, each looking different, to match the look of several different nuclear and thermonuclear tests.

Best Post-Blast Exclamation

Threads: “Jesus Christ, they’ve done it. They’ve done it.”

Best Depiction of a Human Being Caught in a Nuclear Blast

Come on, didn’t you all wonder what it would be like to be stuck out in the open when the Bomb hit? Science consultants were asked to suggest what it would look like during pre-production for The Day After. They gave less-than-helpful responses, such as: “It wouldn’t look like anything; your camera would melt.” The Day After’s solution was to begin with a series of freeze frames of Kansas City citizens amid casual gestures (a woman looking up, wedding guests as a bride and groom kiss, a teacher in front of her class, pedestrians on the street). Then, in each, the background fills with a bright yellowish orange, and the figures momentarily turn into blueish X-ray images of their skeletons until the entire frame fades to yellow and white. This unique effect is ambitious, perhaps even state-of-the-art for its day (one shot of a mother holding her baby even manages to suggest that their brains are boiling). But for all that, the special effect looks like a special effect (and more than a little reminiscent of a soldier’s disintegration in the 1953 War of the Worlds). This shows how hard it is to film something believable and dramatically compelling.

In another category altogether is the quintessential 1960s doomsday thriller Fail Safe (1964). Moments before 40 megatons consume New York City, we are treated to some brief glimpses of Manhattan street life. At the instant of detonation, each scene suddenly turns into freeze frames into which the camera abruptly zooms, catching details of people frozen in mid-motion. It conveys the idea of everyday life coming to sudden, simultaneous termination.

When Ottawa is destroyed in The Lost Missile, shots of people in their fallout shelters begin to gray out, then simultaneously go out of focus and shake violently.

The War Game (1965): At the moment of detonation, footage of people running for shelter cross-fades into the over-exposed photographic negative. The camera shakes, the actors in the frame cry out in pain and cover their eyes, while the footage fades back from negative to positive as an unemotional voice-of-god narrator explains: “At this distance, the heat wave is sufficient to cause melting of the upturned eyeball, third-degree burns of the skin, and ignition of furniture.” This scene can make audiences wince to this day.

But for audacious low-budget ingenuity, my hat comes off, and the Armageddon Award goes out to:

Bert I. Godon’s cheap 1957 drive-in flick, The Amazing Colossal Man. In an opening that probably inspired the Incredible Hulk, a man is trapped in the open during a nuclear test. There is a bright flash, and he throws his arms over his eyes as a cloud of white blasts over him. After a quick cut, his clothes have burned off his body, and his skin is covered with burns. Then, the shock wave knocks him off-screen. Gutsy moments of 1950s pop culture like these provided Boomer kids with essential pieces to the puzzle of the last moments of their lives.

There is one film that goes even further in its depiction of the personal effects of an atomic blast, but we will have to combine this with our Award for:

Best Large-Scale Depiction of Heat Flash and Shock Wave

Recreating the heat flash is challenging but doable. The shock wave is trickier. It would be difficult for any special effects crew to come up with anything as extraordinary as atomic test newsreel footage of houses being slammed as if by an invisible fist or trees bowing as their leaves are knocked away. Most films didn’t even try. As late as 1983, The Day After still used those 30-year-old black-and-white clips.

Given that, let us applaud the makers of 1953’s Split Second for an impressive miniature shot in which the film’s entire western ghost town setting, including a moving car, is knocked into splinters and swept away.

“Shelter Skelter,” a 1985 “Twilight Zone,” contains a remarkably intimate and economical depiction of flash and blast. A man is standing in his living room when his picture windows suddenly blaze with brilliant white light. Curtains and furniture catch fire. The man turns tail and runs downstairs to his fallout shelter. He is carried the last couple of yards into the shelter by the shock wave, along with bits of charred debris.

But the Award for the blockbuster, all-time best special-effects Flash and Blast goes to:

Terminator Two (1991): A woman watches as children and parents innocently frolic in a playground. From a city behind them comes a brilliant blaze of light. Everyone covers their eyes, and the ground begins to smoke. A mushroom cloud rises over the city. The people at the playground scream as their bodies catch fire. Within seconds, their skins blacken to that charred cracklin that eyewitnesses described covering the victims of Hiroshima. We get a quick shot of the shock wave roaring through the city, then closer views as it strips away the facades of buildings, carrying debris through the air, knocking cars off highways and trees out by the roots. When the shock wave hits the playground, it pulverizes the now-charred human bodies. It blasts their ashes away, ending in the dramatic, if scientifically questionable, sight of a standing skeleton whose flesh has been blasted away.

And now, as a public service, I must draw your attention to:

The Worst, I Mean the Absolute Worst Depiction of an Atomic Blast Ever

The Wolverine (2013). The opening of this movie makes me want to tear my hair out. It pretends to be an actual re-enactment of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, witnessed by our hero, Wolverine (the truly super-human Hugh Jackman), and his Japanese friend. They are in direct line of sight of the blast, a couple of miles away. Wolverine’s friend is directly facing it. The flash is not all that bright and is over in only a second. It doesn’t set Wolverine’s friend’s clothes on fire, it doesn’t burn his skin, it doesn’t sear his corneas. Not only does it not blind him, but the guy also barely closes his eyes. In a moment, he can see a very dark fireball rising over Nagasaki and what should be the shock wave heading his way. But it is not a shock wave; it is a fireball. And not a nuclear fireball, it’s a MOVIE fireball! It is one of those action movie fireballs that the hero of the film, any film, can outrun and get to safety. You know what I’m talking about. Not only can Wolverine and his friend outrun this fireball, but they can also jump into a well about 20 feet deep into the ground. If you are ever caught in sight of a nuclear blast, that is EXACTLY what you should do. Exactly! It will hide you from an atomic heat flash and a shock wave. So, Wolverine and his friend should, from this moment, be perfectly safe. But NOOOOOOOO! In the film, that damned movie fireball chases Wolverine and his buddy down into the well! Everyone’s favorite X-Man must clamp a metal sheet over his friend to keep the fireball from burning his skin to a crisp. Wolverine is not so lucky, but being Wolverine, he gets better. Don’t, whatever you do, DON’T make the mistake of believing this resembles anything that happens in the real world. I mean, Jesus!

Best Depiction of the Immediate Crisis Response

No contest. The War Game: In an image with an eerie prescience of Chornobyl and 9/11, members of a still-intact Fire Department labor to control an enormous fire. They begin to choke as a passionless voice-over explains: “This is a firestorm. Within its center, oxygen is being consumed in every cellar and every ground floor room, to be replaced by the gases of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. Within its center, the temperature is rising to 800 degrees centigrade. These men are dying. Both of heat stroke and gassing.” Brrrr!!!

Best Depiction of a City in Flames

To this day, no speculative film has surpassed the sight of Tokyo engulfed in a wall of flames created for Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1954) In creating it, director Ishiro Honda and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya achieve a feeling of reality that exceeds any serious attempt to depict nuclear warfare. Honda and Tsuburaya would duplicate this image in color at the end of his 1958 The H-Man and Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965).

HONORABLE MENTION: Godzilla’s immediate sequel, Godzilla Raids Again (1955; aka Gigantis the Fire Monster), cannot on any level compete, but it does contain one image of destruction that feels so right that it must be inspired by personal experience: A woman, miles away from the scene of destruction, watches a cloud of glowing smoke rising in the night above a burning Osaka.

Best Line of Morning-After Dialogue

Split Second: “Let’s take a look at the world of tomorrow.”

Best Morning-After Cityscape

The smoking ruins of Tokyo in Godzilla: King of the Monsters!

Still, who can forget the shot in The Day After of Jason Robards limping past the burnt-out cars and ash-smeared buildings of a Lawrence, Kansas, street while snowflakes of ash drift around him? Speaking of which, how about the:

end of PART ONE

"ARCHITECTS OF FEAR" FROM THE TELEVISION SERIES THE OUTER LIMITS

AN EXPLOSIVE END FOR SOME OF THE POPULATION FROM TERMINATOR 2:JUDGMENT DAY