Blessed Are The Dead
Blessed Are The Dead
Threads
October 6, 2020
The Horror. The Unrelenting Horror.
Threads (1984)
Don't watch Threads. Just don't.
It's a mesmerizing, terrifying, captivating movie. It's well acted, keenly written, thoroughly researched, and compellingly directed.
But don't watch it.
The subject matter is aged, yet urgent. Therefore it's timeless.
Don't watch it.
Threads is a movie about the worst thing that could happen; nuclear war. And it was made at a time when if you were a conscious citizen of the world, nuclear war was on your mind.
Appearing on the BBC in 1984, it must have not just jostled audiences; it likely terrorized them. The years have not lessened its impact or its horror.
Don't watch it.
Threads focuses on the town of Sheffield, England as the world erupts in the sum of all fears and the convergence of all failures - and the missiles fly. Threads seems to have thought of just about everything that a nuclear holocaust would produce: death, terror, pain, chaos, starvation, and despair and it relentlessly injects each of these into you.
The worst part about nuclear devastation? It only gets worse in the aftermath. The air is poison, the soil is dead, civilization is a rumor, and hope is a memory. A common thought shared during the days of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union was that the lucky people in a nuclear war would be those who were wiped out in the first few moments. That must be true. But you don't have to watch Threads to know that.
Don't watch it.
OK, watch it. It's filmmaking at its most intimate because it depicts outrageous events and drops us in the middle of them. What happens on screen hasn't happened to us, but we can all relate.
Watch Threads and resolve that, as you long as you live, it will remain fiction. --TK
Tuesday, October 6, 2020