When THE DAY AFTER was released in England, I was ten, and my brother rented the videotape. I sat and watched it with one of my friends and we decided to fast-forward to the nuclear attack scene, because we'd heard how shocking and graphic it was, and how TV viewers in America jammed the switchboards for reassurance that it was only a movie, and how this was one of the most controversial films ever made. So I didn't expect the scene where the bomb drops to have all the emotional impact of being smacked in the face with a wet handkerchief. Make that a wet handkerchief with a nursery rhyme embroidered around the edges. What do we actually see? A power cut. Sorry, but growing up in England in the seventies, I was quite used to those. It's going to take a lot more than that to scare me. Then we see people and animals being evaporated in a split second. A flash of light, a brief glimpse of a skeleton, then nothing. About as scary as a ride on the ghost train. And guess what? Jason Robards, the star of the show, manages to avoid getting even singed in the blast simply by ducking behind the dashboard of his car. He even manages to keep up a supply of pristine white shirts, right to the sappy conclusion. Sorry to sound so flippant here, but given that the cold war raged for most of the eighties and the nuclear threat was not only real but a distinct possibility, when you're making a movie about what one of those atomic bomb doohickeys can do to a country, you have to go the whole hog or you'll just make the whole thing seem like an inconvenience rather than a disaster. And that's the whole problem with THE DAY AFTER - its very restraint kills it stone dead. I watched the film again a couple of days ago, and the whole thing has a flat, stilted, stagy quality about it that practically screamed "phoney". The characters, performances, dialogue and direction are bland at best and cardboard at worst. Whilst the superior British take on the potential holocaust, THREADS, benefits from a take-no-prisoners approach that forces the horror and confusion of the bomb down the viewer's throats by means of a steady diet of formation vomiting, shootings, degradation, urine, extreme poverty, civic incompetence, excrement-strewn hospitals and burning animals, THE DAY AFTER tiptoes around the unpleasantness and achieves the unthinkable - it sanitiser's the very eventuality that it purports to condemn. It's like a World War Two film daring to suggest that the concentration camps weren't that bad, or a Vietnam war film that depicts the effects of Napalm as being roughly comparable to that of itching powder down the neck. In short, if THREADS is the daddy of all disaster movies, then THE DAY AFTER is a slightly downbeat episode of M*A*S*H in comparison. It doesn't even come close.
Review of The Day After
